Discourse across Languages and Cultures (Studies in Language Companion)

Discourse Across Languages and Cultures

Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS) The SLCS series has been established as a companion series to Studies in Language, International Journal, sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language”.

Series Editors Werner Abraham

Michael Noonan

University of Vienna

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Editorial Board Joan Bybee

Christian Lehmann

University of New Mexico

University of Erfurt

Ulrike Claudi

Robert Longacre

University of Cologne

University of Texas, Arlington

Bernard Comrie

Brian MacWhinney

Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

Carnegie-Mellon University

William Croft

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of Manchester

Edith Moravcsik

Östen Dahl

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

University of Stockholm

Masayoshi Shibatani

Gerrit Dimmendaal

Rice University and Kobe University

University of Cologne

Russell Tomlin

Ekkehard König

University of Oregon

Marianne Mithun

Free University of Berlin

Volume 68 Discourse Across Languages and Cultures Edited by Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic

Discourse Across Languages and Cultures Edited by

Carol Lynn Moder Oklahoma State University

Aida Martinovic-Zic Montgomery College

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Discourse across languages and cultures / edited by Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic. p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165–7763 ; v. 68) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Discourse analysis. 2. Intercultural communication. I. Moder, Carol Lynn. II. Martinovic-Zic, Aida. III. Series. P302. D5478 2003 401’.41-dc22 isbn 90 272 3078 1 (Eur.) / 1 58811 449 X (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2003062860

© 2004 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Contents 1. Discourse across cultures, across disciplines Carol Lynn Moder

1

2. Holistic textlinguistics Robert E. Longacre

13

3. Discourse effects of polysynthesis Wallace Chafe

37

4. Prosodic schemas Rebecca L. Damron

53

5. Rhetorical relations in dialogue Maite Taboada

75

6. Interlanguage pragmatics Euen Hyuk (Sarah) Jung

99

7. Discourse-marker use in native and non-native English speakers Hikyoung Lee

117

8. Discourse markers across languages Suzanne Fleischman and Marina Yaguello

129

9. Intertextuality across communities of practice Ron Scollon

149

10. Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology Patricia Mayes

177

11. How people move Dan I. Slobin

195

12. Why manner matters Jelena Jovanovic and Aida Martinovic-Zic

211

13. Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives Mary Theresa Seig

227

14. Rhetorical influences William G. Eggington

251

15. Contrastive discourse analysis Joanne Neff, Emma Dafouz, Mercedes Díez, Rosa Prieto, and Craig Chaudron

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16. Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue Elizabeth Arcay Hands and Ligia Cossé

285

17. Texts as image schemas Tânia Gastão Saliés

301

18. Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities Ruth A. Berman

329

Index of subjects Index of languages Index of names

357 362 363

CHAPTER 1

Discourse across cultures, across disciplines An overview Carol Lynn Moder Oklahoma State University

My purpose in this chapter is to frame the themes of this book and to highlight the paradigms and perspectives represented in the work of the contributors and the ways in which they can be productively brought into dialogue. I will begin by exploring the concept of culture which is central to the main theme of this volume: the investigation of discourse across languages and cultures. Although there are myriad definitions and approaches to culture we could espouse in order to frame the book, I would like for the moment to cite the one put forth in a somewhat controversial speech which the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss addressed to UNESCO in 1971: . . . one could say that cultures are like trains moving each on its own track, at its own speed, and in its own direction. The trains rolling alongside ours are permanently present for us; through the windows of our compartments, we can observe at our leisure the various kinds of car, the faces and gestures of the passengers. But if, on an oblique or a parallel track, a train passes in the other direction, we perceive only a vague, fleeting, barely identifiable image, usually just a momentary blur in our visual field, supplying no information about the event itself and merely irritating us because it interrupts our placid contemplation of the landscape which serves as the backdrop to our daydreaming. Every member of a culture is as tightly bound up with it as this ideal traveler is with his own train. From birth and, as I have said, probably even before, the things and beings in our environment establish in each one of us an array of complex references forming a system — conduct, motivations, implicit judgments, which education then confirms by means of its reflexive view of the historical development of our civilization. We literally move along with this reference system, and the cultural systems established outside it are perceptible to us only through the distortions imprinted upon them by our own system. Indeed, it may even make us incapable of seeing those other systems. (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 10–11)

Lévi-Strauss’s metaphor pictures culture as a closed reference system which affects our ability to perceive the ideas and cultures of others. He portrays the view of anthropology to be that “direct knowledge of the societies most different from ours permits an appreciation of the reasons for existence that they have provided

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for themselves” (1985: 10). Clifford Geertz (1986) in an essay called “The Uses of Diversity” suggests that Lévi-Strauss’s image of culture as a closed train compartment in which the strange is outside, is not adequately descriptive of a modern society in which we are no longer studying exotic unknown cultures. Geertz points out that the anthropologist no longer has as a primary role the description of far away places where men think themselves descended from wallabies but instead seeks to portray cultures which are “scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social spaces whose edges are unfixed, irregular and difficult to locate.” (p. 121) and where as he puts it “the strangenesses . . . are growing more oblique and more shaded, less easily set off as wild anomalies” (p. 120). Here we have a picture of culture not as a series of compartments on a train or a snapshot of an exotic view but rather as a panorama or a collage. In such a situation Geertz suggests that “locating these strangenesses and describing their shapes may be in some ways more difficult; but it is hardly less necessary (p. 120) and that “it is in . . . strengthening the power of our imagination to grasp what is in front of us, that the uses of diversity and of the study of diversity lie” (p. 123). Another metaphor for culture which is more in keeping with Geertz’s view of modern cultures is one used by Dan Sperber in his book, Explaining Culture. . . . an idea, born in the brain of one individual, may have, in the brains of other individuals, descendants that resemble it. Ideas can be transmitted, and by being transmitted from one person to another, they may even propagate. Some ideas — religious beliefs, cooking recipes, or scientific hypotheses, for instance- propagate so effectively that, in different versions, they may end up durably invading whole populations. Culture is made up, first and foremost, of such contagious ideas. (Sperber 1996: 1)

Sperber’s metaphor of ideas as contagion suggests two factors in the spread of ideas within a culture: first, the strength of the ideas themselves as reflected in their ability to propagate and second, the degree of resistance to the ideas offered by the population. He goes on to define what we call cultural as “those representations that are widely and durably distributed in a social group” and to suggest that such a definition indicates that “there is no boundary, no threshold, between cultural representations and individual ones” (1996: 49) If we pause a moment to blend Sperber’s infection metaphor with the domain of our own discipline, it suggests some interesting possible views of the way that adherents to particular disciplinary approaches might be gained. For example: Is it possible to infect a formalist with functionalist ideas if functionalist perspectives have grown, like bacteria, to epidemic proportions? Can a minimalist syntactician be induced to consider naturally occurring, discourse level data, if you catch her in a weakened state after an exhausting analysis of bare X-bar theory and the phrasal uniformity condition for chain links? The cross-paradigm possibilities are intriguing. Sperber’s view of culture emphasizes the ideas of a culture and their contagious qualities. He proposes that the role of anthropology, and social science in general, is to describe the distribution of ideas in a culture and to explain why some represen-

Discourse across cultures, across disciplines

tations are more successful in a given population than others — to develop what he calls an “epidemiology of representations.” He asserts that such an approach requires an investigation of individual mental representations as well as the mechanisms by which these representations are transmitted from one individual to another. Why then do we as linguists and applied linguists engage in the study of discourse “across cultures”? Do we examine the discourse of another culture in order to glean a more direct knowledge and understanding of that culture’s framework of knowledge in the same way that Lévi-Strauss’s passenger peers into passing train cars and observes the gestures and faces of others? Do we, like Geertz, use language comparisons between cultures to help us to illuminate the diverse language phenomena all around us? Or do we, as Sperber suggests, seek to describe the distribution of discourse phenomena across cultures and to explain them based on a study of individual representations and societal conventions for transmitting them? I would like to suggest that over the last thirty years we have moved thorough all of these approaches to discourse across cultures. Furthermore, at least initially, each of the disciplines represented in this volume, Contrastive Rhetoric, Rhetorical Typology, Discourse Analysis, and Translation Studies, could very easily have been characterized as a closed reference system, similar to one of Levi-Strauss’s trains and the researchers in each discipline as passengers. Inside each train, the passengers boarded at the same point of departure, focused on the same landscape, and attempted to reach the same destination. On the other trains, different passengers were focusing on other parts of the landscape and moving in other directions. There was relatively little contact between the passengers on each train so that generally the behaviors or ideas of those other passengers were often just momentary blurs. However, in recent years these disciplinary trains appear to have converged onto parallel tracks, and while they are still focusing on different parts of the landscape, they appear to be traveling toward similar destinations. The paths of these four trains are beginning to converge. I would like to trace their paths up to this point. In order to do so, I have chosen to highlight the initial points of departure from which these trains began their journeys. Let us first survey the landscape of linguistics and applied linguistics as it was in the year 1965, before any of our four trains left the station. In 1965, articles in the journal, Language, showed a predominance of structural and transformational generative approaches to phonology and syntax. Even among those who resisted the tenets of the generative framework, sentence-level analysis and examples were clearly the norm. Although Hymes’s Language in Culture and Society had appeared the preceding year, its emphasis on the social bases of communication had not yet been taken up by mainstream linguists. At this point, the field of applied linguistics mirrored the trends in theoretical linguistics, as can be seen from examining articles from the journal Language Learning for the same year. In 1965, the articles in Language Learning focused primarily on the application of structural or generative approaches to language, with topics including a contrastive analysis of verb phrases in English and Portuguese, the role of

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deep structures in teaching languages, and the use of transformational grammar to increase the proportion of well-formed sentences produced by Japanese learners. Into this landscape of sentence-based phonological and syntactic analyses, our first train departs. The field of Contrastive Rhetoric was set in motion with the publication in 1966 of an article by Robert Kaplan in the journal, Language Learning. In this article, titled “Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education,” Robert Kaplan proposed the study of culturally determined rhetorical patterns as a means of addressing a problem which was then pervasive in the field of applied linguistics. Kaplan stated: . . . by accounting for the cultural aspects of logic which underlie the rhetorical structure, this approach may bring the student not only to an understanding of contrastive grammar and a new vocabulary . . . but also to a grasp of idea and structure in units larger than the sentence. A sentence, after all, rarely exists outside a context. Applied linguistics teaches the student to deal with the sentence, but it is necessary to bring the student beyond that to a comprehension of the whole context. He can only understand the whole context if he recognizes the logic on which the context is based. (Kaplan 1996: 15)

This ground-breaking focus on language in contexts larger than the sentence would later become the foundation of all discourse analysis approaches, but in 1966 Kaplan was one of its few vocal advocates. However, while Kaplan rejected the sentence as a unit of analysis, he did espouse other tenets of mainstream linguistics and applied linguistics, in particular the notion of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis concerning the role of language in shaping a world view. Kaplan refers, for example, to “the English language and its related thought patterns” (p. 3) and throughout the paper seems to equate a language or a language group with a particular rhetorical perspective. After this shocking denial of the primacy of the sentence, Kaplan went on in his article to provide an example of how such a rhetorical study could outline the ways in which the “cultural thought patterns,” of various language groups were distinct from those expected by native speakers and readers of English. His second interesting innovation was to examine real language data. Kaplan’s conclusions were based on an examination of more than 598 paragraphs written in English by speakers of Arabic, Korean, Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian, in some cases tracing these patterns back to textual patterns in the first language, which he exemplified using translations of published texts. From the point of view of his place in the annals of applied linguistics, one of the most significant features of his methodology was his decision to represent the rhetorical movement of five cultural distinct paragraphs, using the now well-known set of squiggles or doodles. These doodles captured the intuitions and the imaginations of language teachers and were later reproduced in numerous articles and textbooks. The English squiggle was intended to represent the patterns of the idealized English expository paragraph. Based on citations from the work of various rhetoricians and examples from published academic texts, Kaplan described the ideal English expository paragraph as being dominantly linear, usually beginning with a topic

Discourse across cultures, across disciplines

sentence and proceeding deductively to develop that central idea with a series of examples and illustrations. To this English model, Kaplan then compared the patterns of writing in English of students in his sample from three major groups: Semitic (primarily Arabic); Oriental (primarily Chinese and Korean), and Romance, (primarily French and Spanish). The Arabic pattern was characterized by syntactic and rhetorical parallelism and the extensive use of coordination over subordination. “Oriental” writing , which Kaplan defines in a footnote as applying only to Korean and Chinese, treated the topic from a variety of indirectly related views. The texts in Spanish and French are described as allowing much greater freedom to digress than the English paragraph. A single Russian student’s text is described as containing two short sentences followed by a very long sentence combining parallel and subordinate constructions, some of which are not directly relevant to the central idea. Although Kaplan’s use of actual data was remarkable at that time, his ability to outline his precise methodology was not. Although Kaplan indicated that he had analyzed these 598 samples, it was not clear whether his examples were meant to be representative of the entire group or whether they were intended simply as examples of the kind of analysis he envisioned. There is also the curious feature of the inclusion of a diagram for Russian, even though only 1 Russian speaker was in his sample. Another major problem lay in characterizing the discourse patterns of other languages primarily on the basis of the paragraphs written in English by speakers of those languages. This was presumably related to his belief in the transfer of linguistically determined thought patterns from the first language into the second language, a view which Kaplan rejects in later work, as indicated by the following quote from a 1987 article: it is now my opinion that all of the various rhetorical modes identified in the “doodles article” are possible in any language — ie. in any language which has written text. The issue is that each language has clear preferences, so that while all forms are possible, all forms do not occur with equal frequency or in parallel distribution . . . the variations are marked for sociolinguistic constraints, for written versus oral usage and for a number of other features. The native speaker can choose among them, presumably recognizing the various pertinent constraints. (Kaplan 1987: 10–11).

In the light of the extensive critiques of Kaplan’s 1966 article, it is important to note that in it Kaplan explicitly acknowledged that the categories that he described for these languages were only tentative and that more detailed and accurate descriptions were needed. He also acknowledged that the English paragraph he described was one that presented a typical target appropriate for non-native speakers learning English expository writing and that it did not describe all English paragraphs. This early approach of Kaplan’s seems to have been an example of attempting to peer into the cultural reference system of passengers on a train rolling alongside. Although the gestures and the faces were visible, the reference system which created them was not readily apparent. However, Kaplan’s article did cause a shift in the focus of the passengers on his own train. The landscape had clearly altered.

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From that initial point of departure contrastive rhetoric has traveled a great distance, with occasional influences from work in other fields. Of all of the four approaches which we will consider, contrastive rhetoric seems to have been infected with ideas from other disciplines most readily. This is probably because many of those engaged in work with second language learners came to the field of contrastive rhetoric with a background in theoretical linguistics. When they boarded the train in the 1980s, they brought with them infectious ideas from sociolinguistics, from discourse analysis, and from text linguistics. Unfortunately, the direction of the influence seems to have been only in one direction. Linguists have generally perceived the work of applied linguistics only as a momentary blur on the landscape. It is, therefore, important for the purposes of this volume to at least briefly outline some of the later developments of contrastive rhetoric. A more complete overview of the current state of Contrastive Rhetoric can be found in Ulla Connor’s book, Contrastive Rhetoric (1996). Kaplan’s early methodology has been succeeded by contrastive approaches which have been informed by traditions in text linguistics, particularly those of Enkvist (1984) and Halliday (1973). These studies have typically focused on coherence within texts, as represented by the arrangement of information. An example of this approach is Hinds (1987, 1990), who described the use of quasi-inductive organization with a delayed introduction of purpose in Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Chinese newspaper editorials, a pattern which he traces to a cultural emphasis on reader instead of writer responsible prose. Hinds described reader responsible prose as a type of writing in which the purpose may be left open, transitions and topic sentences are used infrequently and the reader is charged with the responsibility for interpreting the text. This typology has also been used to characterize the writing of Germans (Clyne 1987) Poles, and Finns (Ventola and Mauranen 1991), among others. A second example in this tradition is the work of Eggington (1987), who described two patterns of writing common in Korean journals and newspapers, one similar to a traditional Korean pattern of beginning, development, change of direction, and ending and the other a more linear, general to specific pattern commonly used by those with degrees from American universities. One noteworthy aspect of Eggington’s analysis is his investigation of the effect of these patterns on the ability of Koreans to understand texts. He hypothesized that the more traditional Korean style would better meet the expectations of Korean readers and would therefore be better understood than the more linear pattern. These results were confirmed in a recall experiment in which two types of texts were recalled by 37 Korean adults. Although there was no significant difference in the recall of the two texts in the immediate recall condition, the Korean subjects had much better recall of the traditionally structured text than the linear text after a week’s delay. Another noteworthy aspect of Eggington’s approach is his observation of the important effect of contact with other cultures and discourse patterns on the acceptability of various discourse patterns, a theme he has continued in his more recent work.

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Also in this tradition is some of the work of Tirkkonen-Condit, who developed a four unit theory of argument structure consisting of situation- problem-solutionand evaluation, which has been used both in contrastive rhetoric studies and in the newer field of translation studies (Connor 1996). Another major outgrowth of contrastive rhetoric’s focus on cohesion, has been the development of the field of genre analysis, which has most closely been associated with the work of John Swales (1990). Genre based approaches have typically followed Swales in analyzing the structure of texts in terms of moves. An example of this is Swales’s analysis of the introduction to an academic research article into three moves: establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and occupying the niche. In Swales’s approach such moves can also be further subdivided and the use of linguistic features, such as tense and reference, are then examined within each move. Genre studies have examined research articles in a variety of disciplines, conference abstracts, grant proposals, and business letters among others. A more recent sociolinguistic trend in contrastive approaches to discourse can be found in the work of Scollon. His work has focused on the needs of those who are second language users in specific discourse contexts. In contrast to the earlier work in the area, the work of Scollon has highlighted the sociocultural frameworks which underlie certain discourse preferences and the way in which speakers “use communication to claim and display . . . complex and multiple identities.” (Scollon and Scollon 1995: xi). One example of this approach is Scollon and Scollon’s reanalysis of the reasons for the preference of Chinese and some other East Asian speakers for the inductive, delayed introduction of purpose structure. Scollon and Scollon suggest that this preference is not based on a cultural template but rather is based on differences in the cultural structuring of situations and participants’ roles. It is related to politeness strategies and the concept of face. As can be seen from this brief overview of work that has grown from the contrastive rhetoric tradition, these researchers have focused primarily on written texts and have investigated a wide of variety of written genres across a variety of language and cultural groups, using increasingly more sophisticated analyses of the cultural values of the groups involved. This is clearly a major contribution of the discipline. Those outside of applied linguistics who have tended to restrict their analyses to spoken language and to the genre of narrative in particular, may find this extensive work in other genres instructive. Moving ten years ahead from the appearance of Kaplan’s article, we find two groups of researchers working with two distinct sets of goals but both, like Kaplan, engaging in descriptive work on discourse beyond the sentence level. The first of these two points of departure is the translation-based work of Robert Longacre and his colleagues at the Summer Institute of Linguistics. While Longacre was an advocate of the importance of paragraph and discourse-level analysis, in his early work he suggested that discourse work was an option the student could pursue after mastering lower levels of analysis, like the word, phrase and clause. In (1976) Longacre revised this view as the following quote indicates:

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Carol Lynn Moder . . . all work on lower levels is lacking in perspective and meets inevitable frustration when the higher levels — especially discourse and paragraph — have not been analyzed . . . In view of these considerations, discourse analysis emerges not as an option or as a luxury for the serious student of a language, but as a necessity. (Longacre 1976: 2)

Longacre and his colleagues were also similar to Kaplan in that their work was directed to a clearly defined applied goal, in this case, the preparation of literacy material and bible translations. In order to achieve these goals Longacre and his colleagues focused on establishing a taxonomy of discourse and paragraph types and on finding explanations for choices of particular linguistic structures in the discourse. Although Longacre’s typology included a variety of paragraph types — Narrative, Procedural, Expository and Hortatory — most of the descriptive work done by researchers within this paradigm focused on narrative. The second project which served to define the fledgling field of discourse analysis was undertaken in 1975 at Berkeley by Wallace Chafe and his colleagues. They embarked on an analysis of the narratives of subjects from a variety of cultures, who retold the events of a specially designed silent film which portrayed events including the picking and subsequent removal of some pears. This study framed a tight methodology for the investigation of verbalization of knowledge. In the introduction to the book which describes these pear stories, Chafe outlines the assumptions and goals of the project. To begin with we assumed that much of human knowledge is stored non-verbally . . . Processes of verbalization must be applied to communicate knowledge, and probably even in order to think about it in certain modes of thinking. We believed it would be useful to collect examples of different people talking about the same thing, as well as the same person talking about the same thing at different times, in order to see what similarities and differences emerged between different verbalizations of what was, at least to a large extent, the same knowledge . . . And we suspected that oral language provides valuable clues to verbalization processes that are missing in written language. We also wanted to collect data in a number of different languages in order to compare our findings cross-linguistically. (Chafe 1980: xi–xii)

What is notable here is the focus on discourse as a window on human cognition, a theme which Chafe has continued throughout his work. The studies collected in the volume vary in their emphases, but treat the following range of issues: the expression of consciousness in terms of focus and centers of interest, culturally conventionalized views of the narrative task and resulting rhetorical strategies, determinants of lexical choice, referential choice, definiteness, and subjecthood in narrative. Each of these issues has formed a strand of research which continues to be pursued by researchers in discourse analysis today. Our fourth and final point of departure comes in the 1980’s when a similarly broad and ambitious project was begun by Berman and Slobin. This was of course the narrative research project centered around Mercer Mayer’s picture book, Frog, where are you?. Like Chafe and his colleagues, Berman and Slobin were interested in

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“a better understanding of the complex of linguistic, cognitive, and communicative abilities that underlie the human ability to capture and convey events in the words” (Berman and Slobin 1994: ix). They were primarily interested in the development of linguistic form in children but their study had one distinctive focus which is especially relevant to researchers in cross-linguistic discourse. This is the investigation of the ways in which experience is filtered through language for the purposes of speaking, what Slobin has called “thinking for speaking.” Slobin has defined “thinking for speaking” as: a special form of thought mobilized for communication..The activity of thinking takes on a particular quality when it is employed in the activity of speaking. In the evanescent time frame of constructing utterances in discourse one fits one’s thoughts into available linguistic frames. ‘Thinking for speaking’ involves picking those characteristics of objects and events that (a) fit some conceptualization of the event and (b) are readily encodable in language.” (Slobin 1996: 76)

Here Slobin echoes Chafe in the contention that the process of verbalization shapes thought in specific ways. However, while Chafe has focused on the way in which consciousness is realized in language, Slobin directly highlights the impact of the linguistic system on what is communicated. He revisits the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by framing the effects of linguistic structure as effects on speaking and rhetorical structure, but not necessarily on thought per se. The particular linguistic forms the frog story paradigm investigated were those suggested by Talmy’s (1985, 1987) earlier typology of verbs and satellites: tense/aspect inflections, verb particles and prepositions. The paradigm investigated the genre of narrative precisely because it was most likely to provide this kind of data. The frog stories studies confirm that these linguistic features are related to different rhetorical patterns and different developmental patterns in first language learners. This work marked a new focus which integrated cognition, linguistic form, and rhetorical patterns into a single investigation, forming a new discipline of rhetorical typology. Based on this forty year survey of highlights of work in contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that we in linguistics and applied linguistics, like our colleagues in anthropology, have over time moved from peering into train windows, to analyzing diversity within and across cultures, to an epidemiology of discourse. In order to move to this point we have had to shift from a leisurely contemplation of the passing landscape to a closer focus on each of its features and on the significance of the momentary blurs. Our close contemplation has led to ever more sophisticated and detailed analyses of the pieces of the landscapes we have been scrutinizing, but there is much that each of us has left unexamined. For example, Contrastive Rhetoric has focused extensively on the organization of written texts. This focus has resulted in detailed analyses of the organizational structures and cultural conventions for a great number of genres across widely disparate language and cultural groups. However, possibly because the organizational differences in expository prose across cultures are so striking, there has been relatively

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little focus on specific linguistic or typological features. The discipline began with a strong belief in the power of language to influence thought, but more recent studies have tended to abandon this question. Given the findings of the frog story researchers, it may be time for contrastive rhetoricians to re-examine this question. On the other hand, cross-linguistic discourse analysis has focused almost exclusively on spoken language and, more particularly, on narrative. Here the main issues of interest have been the distribution and explanation of linguistic forms, with less emphasis on rhetorical organization and sociocultural explanation. While we have learned a great deal about the use of these forms in spoken narratives, this narrow focus raises questions about the generalizability of findings about consciousness or the role of linguistic patterns to other genres. For example, given the findings of Halliday (1987) and Chafe and Danielwicz (1987) regarding the differences in the prominence and elaboration of nouns and verbs in written and spoken texts, will we find verb/satellite relations to be as important in writing as in speaking? Can we expect the features involved in “thinking for speaking” to also be involved in “thinking for writing? or does writing shape consciousness in a distinct way? All of the approaches and paradigms represented in this volume have sought to answer broader theoretical issues, not just about spoken narrative, or about written academic research papers, or about how to translate a specific text but about the nature of discourse. An overview of these questions would include the following: How is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice, referential choice, definiteness, and subjecthood and how are they realized? What are the effects of different organizational structures? To what extent are discourse patterns based on cultural values? To what extent are discourse patterns based on the linguistic forms available in a language? How can these cultural discourse patterns best be learned? How can they be translated? If we wish to answer these questions, we need to move beyond individual disciplines and particular research paradigms to search for the both the common and distinct facets of discourse across language and cultures. We need to disembark from our trains, find a waiting room at the station and proceed to expose each other to our ideas. This book is an attempt to begin that dialogue.

References Berman, Ruth and Dan I. Slobin. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Chafe, Wallace. L. 1980. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace. L. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chafe, Wallace and Jane Danielwicz. 1987. “Properties of spoken and written discourse.” In Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels (eds.), Comprehending Oral and Written Language, 83–113. New York: Academic Press.

Discourse across cultures, across disciplines Clyne, Michael G. 1987. “Cultural differences in the organization of academic texts: English and German.” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 211–247. Connor, Ullla. 1996. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eggington, William. 1987. “Written academic discourse in Korean: Implications for effective communication.” In Ulla Connor and Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 153–168. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Enkvist, N.E. 1984. “Constrative linguistics and text linguistics.” In J. Fisiak (ed.), Contrastive Linguistics: Prospects and problems, 45–67. The Hague: Mouton. Geertz, Clifford. 1986. “The uses of diversity.” Michigan Quarterly Review 25: 105–123. Halliday, M.A. K. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1987. “Spoken and written modes of meaning.” In Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels (eds.), Comprehending Oral and Written Language, 55–82. New York: Academic Press. Hinds, John. 1987. “Reader vs. writer responsibility: A new typology.” In Ulla Connor and Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 141–152. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hinds, John. 1990. “Inductive, deductive, quasi-inductive: Expositiory writing in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Thai.” In Ulla Connor and Ann Johns (eds.), Coherence in Writing: Research and pedagogical perspectives, 87–110. Alexandria, VA: TESOL. Kaplan, Robert B. 1966. “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.” Language Learning 16: 1–20. Kaplan, Robert B. 1987.“Cultural thought patterns revisited.” In Ulla Connor & Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 texts, 9–21. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. The View from Afar. New York: Basic Books. Longacre, Ronald E. 1996. The Grammar of Discourse, second edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Longacre, Ronald E. and Woods, Frances. 1976. Discourse Grammar: Studies in indigenous languages of Colombia, Panama and Ecuador. New York: Plenum Press. Scollon, Ron and Scollon, Suzanne Wong. 1995. Intercultural Communication. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Slobin, Dan I. 1996. “From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’ .” In John Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 70–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A naturalistic approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Len. 1985. “Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms.” In Tim Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 56–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Len. 1987.“The relation of grammar to cognition.” In B. Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), Topics on Cognitive Linguistics, 165–206. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ventola, E. and A. Mauranen. 1991. “Non-native writing and native revising of scientific articles.” In E. Ventola (ed.), Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and uses, 457– 492. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

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CHAPTER 2

Holistic textlinguistics Robert E. Longacre University of Texas at Arlington and the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Introduction In this chapter I present textlinguistics or discourse analysis as the completion and fulfillment of linguistics as generally conceived and bounded. Textlinguistics knits up the many loose ends left from the morphosyntax. There are many unanswered questions that remain after the analysis of words, clauses, and sentences (Longacre 1979a). In regard to these unanswered questions textlinguistics has considerable explanatory power. I have argued this for many years, and the field of linguistic studies has not been wholly unaffected by such argumentation on the part of myself and others. The point of this chapter, however, is to argue that textlinguistic analysis itself must be considered to bend back upon itself so that the most general and holistic text concerns are interlaced with lower level and more specific concerns. The analysis is necessarily circular in a non-vicious and reinforcing sense. The strategy of this chapter will be to present the concepts displayed on the chart found in Appendix A, then to apply them to the analysis of a novel, The Final Diagnosis (TFD), by Arthur Hailey (1959).¹

1. Overarching concerns I discuss here concerns which are grouped under A. in the appended chart. The reason for insisting on text type and its corresponding template as a logical starting point in textual analysis is to insure that we are not barking up the proverbial wrong tree as we begin (Longacre 1996.7). A narrative, e.g., has narrative movement and it is fruitless to analyze it as if it were a scientific paper, a food recipe, or a piece of logical argumentation. When we say that a text has narrative movement we expect to find that it is built on a narrative template, a conceptual scheme which in broad outline is as old as Aristotle. More about this below. If we find a text to be a piece of exhortation, we expect to find it built on a hortatory template with cognitive components which are probably universal: Authority of the exhorter; Situation/Problem; Command element(s); Motivation (Longacre 1996.34). Explanation or descriptive discourse also involves, as a static discourse type that is quite the opposite of narrative, elements of universality. E. Winter and M. Hoey (1983) have successfully dem-

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onstrated, in this regard a four-point template: Situation, Problem, Solution, Evaluation. This is not to deny that particular cultures or culture settings may not develop templates of applicability to discourses of a specialized nature, e.g., food recipes in current American culture, and, I suspect, a template underlying a typical piece of transformational-generative grammar (resemblant in some ways to the WinterHoey template mentioned above), nor is it to claim that all discourse types necessarily have underlying templates; I do not, e.g., think that we find them in lyric poetry. Be all this as it may, it is particularly the narrative template that concerns us here because I have chosen to illustrate my general methodology via a novel. Certainly an essential element of the narrative template (Longacre 1996.33–38) is the Inciting Incident — which is a way of saying that all stories must have a reason for being told. Something happens that breaks a normal expectancy chain and “thereby hangs a tale”. Only in such circumstances as witnessing in a court of law are recitals without an inciting incident tolerated and relevant. After the inciting incident, the nascent story then proceeds by way of Mounting Tension to a Climax — and beyond Climax to a Denouement. The relation of the last two elements to each other is captured quite well in French where the former is called the Nouement. The metaphor is suggested: Knot it all up proper and then untie it. Commonly such concerns are referred to as plot. The narrative template as just summarized is just the topological starting point which is subject to many skillful twistings and deformations in the hands of a competent storyteller or novelist. Furthermore, a story may have episodes in which the narrative template is recursively applied — witness the series of episodes ending in cliffhangers in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. As we shall see in looking at Hailey’s novel below, a longer sort of story may have several interweaving plot structures which are subservient to and which forward the main plot. The narrative template may be employed so as to intensively cultivate a small plot of ground as in Virginia Wolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway where many of the successive events of the day recounted by the novelist consist of ruminations and flashbacks on the part of its main character, so that even the “stream of consciousness’ is not without a chronological framework. Several points indicated under A. in the chart “text type and its template” have already been commented on above. Thus the last implicate, recursion² has been mentioned. The second implicate has only been hinted at. Portions of the constituency structure (paragraphs and embedded discourses) which correspond to naturally prominent points on the underlying template may be elaborated in some way to explicitly mark their prominence. Thus, while a Stage may inaugurate a narrative by sketching temporal and locational circumstances at the beginning of the story and by introducing one or more of the participants, and while various episodes may develop mounting tension, special surface structure marking may characterize the climax and/or the denouement, and occasionally the Inciting Incident. This special marking often has to do with augmenting in some way the verb structures that routinely mark the storyline, making that point in the narrative more immediate

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and vivid by a variety of devices, and maximum interlacing of participant reference (Longacre 1990: 8–9; 1996: 38–48). This surface structure marking gives the narrative its profile, which is built around one or more such peaks, i.e. zones marked for special prominence in the surface structure. What I have not as yet presented is the first implicate on the chart, that a text has a macrostructure. This is true whether or not a text is built on a template. The macrostructure is peculiar to its text and not universal like the template. Developed and popularized by T. van Dijk (1977, 1980), this concept is of considerable importance to text analysis. For several years I’ve used the following working definition of macrostructure: The gist or abstract of a text which exercises a controlling function over the text in respect to (1) what is included or excluded from mention in the text; (2) what parts are developed in relatively more detail than others; and (3) departures in the mutual ordering of the parts of the text from the default ordering indicated in the template on which the text is built.

Obviously, the macrostructure is related to the theme, which is usually an attempt to capture in a noun phrase the gist of the story. These macrostructural concerns are basic in determining peak marking. Although the template per se indicates a certain natural prominence within the text, the macrostructure indicates at which point or points special surface structure marking may be encountered.

2. Overarching concerns illustrated in The Final Diagnosis The novel is, of course, built on a narrative template. Chapter One, which functions as Stage for the whole novel, is a panoramic view of what is going on in various parts of Three Counties Hospital; it does not seem to foreground any particular participant but mentions several who will be of crucial importance in the following chapters. It does contain a hint of conflict in the efforts which had to be put forth by one of the ranking nurses to get Joseph Pearson, chief of pathology, to sign certain autopsy reports. Chapter 2 clearly foregrounds Dr. Kent O’Donnell by devoting the chapter to him with extensive flashback regarding him before he came to be the director of the hospital and how he came to be its director. It foreshadows coming conflicts by mentioning O’Donnell’s sense of shock on coming to the hospital and finding things a bit careless and shoddy. The chapter closes with another reference to Pearson’s dilatoriness on getting reports in on time, and records O’Donnell’s saying “I think we may have to go to war with Joe Pearson.” Chapter 3 presents Joe Pearson performing an autopsy and displays him in his element and doing a superb job. Thus Chapters 1–3 are largely staging in reference to time, location, and circumstances, and introduce the reader to Kent O’Donnell and Joe Pearson who will head respectively the progressive and conservative factions who will be involved in the coming struggle. It smoothly works in the inciting incident or situation occasioned by

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Pearson’s slowness in getting in pathology reports — without any special fanfare or surface marking. Before any further references to template elements, I first address myself to the delineation of the macrostructure of the novel along with its main plot and subplots. Adapting and revising a suggestion of Mary Williams’ (1978), I take the macrostructure of the novel to be: The struggle between progressives, headed up by Kent O’Donnell and conservatives, headed up by Joe Pearson, as to whether progressive medicine will prevail at Three Counties Hospital, or negligence and outdated procedures will force the hospital to shut down.

Williams in her brilliant paper points out that there are subtle clues that indicate that the struggle going on at the hospital is basically a bipartite struggle in spite of the large cast of characters involved. Chief among these clues is the fact that while we as readers have access to the thoughts and feelings of the progressives through indirect speech which reports such thoughts and feelings, we are left to infer the thoughts and feelings of the conservatives from their facial expressions, body language, and overt utterances. Two observations are noteworthy at this point: (1) Essentially it reduces the complexity of the participant slate to two parties, much like a two party struggle, say, between a turtle and a monkey in a South American indigenous folktale (Longacre and Woods 1976–7); (2) It links closely together the highest level concerns with low level phenomena such as use of reportive or reflective verbs in direct and indirect speech, and hence the structure of clauses and sentences. The latter is, of course, one of the main contentions of this chapter. Even the noun phrases referring to various participants, involving the use of the adjectives “youthful” and “old” serve also to group the participants into the two factions. Williams goes on to list the various sub-plots which tie into and forward the progress of the main plot. With some adaptation and expansion I take these subplots (macrostructures) from her: (1) Will Joe Pearson be forced to retire? (2) Will Vivian Lomburton, a nursing student who is having an affair with Dr. Seddons, a resident in Pathology, prove to have a malignancy in her leg and how will her amputation affect the possible marriage of the two? (3) Will Kent O’Donnell, the director of the hospital and the banner carrier of the Progressives, marry Denise Swayne, a wealthy socialite and leave Three Counties Hospital or will he marry the orthopedic surgeon, Lucy Granger, and stay on directing the hospital? (4) Will old man Eustace Swayne, Denise’s father and close friend of Joe Pearson, come through with his anticipated donation to build a new wing of the hospital even if his friend Pearson is crowded out? (5) Will a new lab worker in pathology, John Alexander, and his wife Elizabeth, have a healthy baby even though Pearson refused to authorize a further

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laboratory test regarding the possible presence of an RH negative factor? (6) Will Dr. Dornberger, the Alexanders’ obstetrician, recognize it is time for him to retire? (7) Will Mrs. Straughan, the chief dietician and director of the hospital kitchen get the new dishwashers that she has requested on several occasions? In regard to these various subplots, I notice that Joe Pearson is so colorful a figure in his own right that a colleague of mine suggested that the macrostructure of the whole novel should be centered on him, i.e., that it should be conceived to be “The sad story of the fall of Dr. Pearson”. My answer to my colleague’s suggestion was that too many parts of the novel would be left uncaptured in such a macrostructure for it to serve such a general purpose. I also note that the most colorful participant is not necessarily central — any more than Satan should be considered to be central, in Milton’s Paradise Lost (cf. C. S Lewis 1942). Subplot 2 above is of importance, aside from its human interest, in that it is Pearson in pathology who has to evaluate Vivian’s biopsy and decide whether or not it is cancerous — but it comes out late in the novel (denouement of subplot 2) that his diagnosis is correct, when a younger colleague dissects the amputated leg. Subplot 3 is of obvious importance to the main plot in that removing O’Donnell from the hospital would be fatal to the progressive cause. Subplot 4, as to whether the Swayne donation will come through, also ties vitally into the plans to modernize the hospital. Subplot 5 culminates in the death of the Alexander’s baby and the resignation of Pearson, and hence to the final resolution of the central tensions of the story. Subplot 6 is perhaps the most marginal of the subplots but Dornberger is one of the progressives himself, although inclined at first to defend Pearson, and has enough vantage point on himself to know when the good of the hospital calls for his retirement. Subplot 7 ties into the final climax and denouement of the main plot. There is an outbreak of typhoid in the hospital — which threatens to close it down — and the new dishwashers desired by Mrs. Straughan should help prevent and control all such future emergencies. Having sketched the main macrostructure and its subsidiary macrostructures as plot and subplots, I now note how the novel progresses to its climax and denouement. Helen Miehle (1978) rightly considers that pp. 281–283 (halfway down the page) constitute a tight, well-marked climax for the entire novel. We have mentioned that the inner thoughts of the “good guys” are accessible to the reader, and in the passage here cited it is O’Donnell himself who is summarizing to himself the sorry predicament into which the hospital has come. Miehle rightly remarks on the sheer variety and rhetorical liveliness found in the nine component paragraphs of this section. She summarizes: Some of the rhetorical devices that Hailey uses to heighten tension in the scene to be examined here are (1) inner reflective monologue, (2) sequences of rhetorical questions, (3) flashbacks, and (4) frequent shifts in paragraph types which shift the time focus from past to present, and then to future.

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Indeed the passage is replete with questions, self-recriminations, admission of failure — as well as resolution to better the situation. Especially telling is where O‘Donnell watches from his office window the comings and goings of people below and meditates both on their trust in medicine and as to whether that trust is not sometimes misplaced. The whole passage is pitched in a highly emotional key — but no higher than the circumstances warrant! But if this passage is marked as climactic, no less marked is the denouement of the main plot some ten pages over in the novel (pp. 293–296). The health authorities have arrived at 5: 00 p.m. as promised, to shut down the kitchen of the hospital and hence the hospital itself. O’Donnell leads a doleful procession down to the pathology laboratory to show the city authorities how the overworked band of men down there have been doggedly analyzing fecal specimen after fecal specimen in order to track down the carrier of typhoid. In terms of participant cast, once the delegation arrives in pathology, we find indeed a crowded stage, that maximum interlacing of participants which so often marks a surface structure peak. On getting to pathology the dialogue is lively and those in the lab register shock at the imminent closing of the hospital. But precisely at this point, a releasing event takes place (Miehle, oral communication), and resolution of the plot is now possible. Just as the group of administrators and the health official are leaving, we are told: “They had reached the door when John Alexander announced, ‘I have it.’” Pearson then bounds across the room and checks out Alexander’s analysis of typhoid bacillus intereactions as seen in diagnostic sugar tests. The presentation is very dramatic (dialogue registered in terse sentence fragments, p. 295) as the countdown proceeds suspensefully down a row of ten test tubes, and Pearson confirms Alexander’s discovery of the carrier — one Mrs. Burgess who is even then working in the cafeteria’s serving line where they have just began to serve supper. She is quickly turned from worker into patient and the contaminated food disposed of. Time: 5: 07 p. m. A real hair’s breath Harry escape for the threatened hospital! Subsequent pages have denouements of various subplots listed above without the peak marking that characterizes the denouement of the main plot. I note again here, that the morphosyntactic surface structure is radically affected at the main denouement — thus demonstrating again the tie-in between the highest and most abstract concerns (template, macrostructure, profile, and peak ) with the lower concerns of sentence, clause, and phrase structure.

3. Medium range concerns I illustrate here from TFD, Chapter 3, the concerns which are grouped under B. and C. in the accompanying chart. Texts are composed of structural paragraphs (not always congruent with the orthographic paragraphing or indentation units of the author, Longacre,1979b). But both text and paragraph are recursive units. Thus, while embedded texts/discourses

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may occur as constituents of a text, eventually texts on the lowest level of embedding are composed of paragraphs. While ultimately paragraphs are composed of sentences and while embedded paragraphs are the rule rather than the exception, nevertheless the latter ultimately break down into sentences on the lowest level of paragraph embedding. The assumption that embedding occurs on both text and paragraph levels is absolutely essential if we are to posit a finite number of text types and paragraph types; otherwise every new situation of embedding that we encounter would lead to positing a new type and the number of types on both levels would be infinite. I will take here a few examples of paragraphs from Chapter 3 of TFD and present them in indentation diagrams which are, in effect, trees turned on their sides. The entire chapter exists in this analyzed form³ and is available on the SIL internet. The intraparagraph relations here used are those found in Longacre (1996), but they could be expressed as the rhetorical relations catalogued by Mann and Thompson (1987a, 1987b, 1993).

3.1 Overview with an example of a narrative paragraph. I begin by giving an overview of TFD, Chapter 3, by giving the main captions down to the second layer of embedding: (1) STAGE: EMBEDDED NARR. DISC. p. 23–28 [Central participant, Pearson, off stage but his coming is anticipated] STAGE: (E) Coordinate Para. EP1 (Weidman and the janitor): NARR. DISC. EP2 (Rinne and Weidman): (N) Comment Para. EP3 (McNeil and Nurse Penfield): Compound Dial. Para. EP4 (Rinne and McNeil): Resolved Simple Dial. Para. EP5 (Seddons and McNeil): Compound Dial. Para. EPn (Mike meets Vivian): Embedded NARR. DISC. EP1 (Entrance of Pearson): (N) Sequence Para. SETTING: (N) Simple Para. SEQ. THESIS1: Quote Para. SEQ. THESIS2: Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS3: (Sentence) SEQ. THESISn: (n) Sequence Para. EP2 (Greetings and preliminary remarks of Pearson): Compound Dial. Para. EP3 (initial incisions) (N) DISC EP1 (inciting incident): Comment Para. EPn (Peak?): (N) Simultaneous Para.

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EP4 (Further progress on the autopsy; Seddons evaluates): (N) Comment Para. [of discourse length] THESIS: (N) Sequence Para. COMMENT: Cyclic Rh-Q-and-A (N) comment Para. THESIS′: (N) Comment Para. EPn (Pearson finds something unexpected): NARR. DISC. EP1: Compound execution Para. [or: (N) Sequence Para.?] EP2 [Vivian’s reaction — simultaneous with EP1]: (E) Cyclic Reason Para. EP3 [Student nurses ask questions] Compound Dialogue Para. EPn (PEAK) (The discovery): Compound Dial. Para. CLOSURE: NARR. DISC. FINIS: (N) = Narrative; (E) = Expository Note in the above that we posit here an embedded discourse which constitutes the entire chapter, and which consists of Stage, five Episodes (of which the last is marked as Episoden and is climactic), Closure, and Finis. The Stage recounts getting the corpse to the autopsy room, preparations for the entrance of Pearson who is to perform the autopsy, and Mike’s meeting Vivian. As indicated, Episode 1 recounts the entrance of Pearson, Episode 2, his preliminary remarks, and Episode 3, the initial incisions. Episode 4 is unique in its embedding of a discourse under the Comment of a Narrative Comment paragraph. This embedded discourse reports Seddon’s musings as he watches the ongoing autopsy. It is a discourse with three points: (1) Pathology was not for him (Seddons); (2) Pathology deadens sensibilities; and (3) the doctor mustn’t get insulated in a protective cocoon. In Epn, which is climactic and the peak of the whole chapter, Pearson discovers what none of the doctors had suspected: although the man had died of a heart condition, he had an advanced case of fibrocaseous tuberculosis which would have killed him anyway, and which calls for precautions to be taken with his family and those who had had close contact with him. Pearson permits himself to gloat to Seddons: “Pathology has its victories too, Dr. Seddons.” The Finis of the whole embedded discourse is puckish: “Then he was gone, leaving a cloud of cigar smoke behind him.” We will now look at a paragraph from earlier in Episode 4 of the embedded discourse which expounds the Stage. As indicated on Example 1, Episode 4 is expounded by a Narrative Comment paragraph, the Comment of which contains the embedded discourse of Seddon’s regarding pathology. The Thesis to which this Comment is appended is a Narrative Sequence paragraph of considerable length. Its first Sequential Thesis 1 is a long embedded Simultaneous paragraph which reports what Pearson and Seddons were doing while McNeil applied himself to the head of the corpse. What the former two are doing is reported as simultaneous with what McNeil is doing, but each line of activity is reported in a Sequence paragraph.

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The degrees of embedding are complex but it is the price we pay for endeavoring to account for the function of each sentence in its context. Example 2 consists of the first part of this Simultaneous para, i.e., what Pearson and Seddons were doing. (2) (TFD, p 31) PRELIMINARY: Now McNeil slipped on his own gloves and went to work with Pearson SIMUL1: (N) Sequence Para. SETTING: By this time, moving, swiftly, the older man had peeled back the chest flap and, hacking the flesh loose with a larger knife, exposed the ribs. SEQ. THESIS1: Simultaneous Para. [fore-weighted] SIMUL1: Next, using the sharp-levered rib cutters, he cut his way into the rib cage, exposing pericardium and lungs. SIMUL2: The gloves, instruments, and table were now beginning to be covered with blood. SEQ. THESIS2: Simultaneous Para. [fore-weighted] SETTING: Seddons, gloved also, on his side of the table was cutting back the lower flaps and flesh and opening the abdomen. SIMUL1: He crossed the room for a pail and began to remove the stomach and intestines, which he put into the pail after studying them briefly. SIMUL2: The odor was beginning to be noticeable. SEQ. THESISn: (N) Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS1: Now Pearson and Seddons together tied off and cut the arteries so the undertaker would have no trouble when it came to embalming. SEQ. THESISn: Taking a small tube from a rack above the table, Seddons turned on a tap and began to siphon blood that had escaped into the abdomen and, after a nod from Pearson, did the same thing for the chest. This example, among other things, illustrates nicely the use of the adverb “now” as a transition marker in narrative text (Cf. H. Dry on “now” in The Great Gatsby). The

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previous paragraph terminates with a long passage on resident McNeil’s concern for how the student nurses were handling what they were obligated to watch. The word “now” as the first word of the paragraph we are now examining serves to jerk us back to the business at hand. The whole sentence is preliminary and is labeled as such in the indentation diagram. Simul 1 (as over against Simul 2 which is not given above) is expounded by a narrative sequence paragraph which consists of three Sequential Theses (actions/events reported in temporal sequence). While the Setting has verbs in the pluperfect, “had peeled . . . (had) exposed” — and is thus off the main sequence by virtue of prior occurrence — the Seq. Theses have verbs in the simple past and in the past progressive. The former are considered to dominate over the latter and the two-sentence unit (Simultaneous paragraph) is considered to be foreweighted. Thus, in Seq. Thesis 1 the event is Pearson’s cutting his way into the rib cage, while it is reported that as he was doing that: “The gloves, instruments, and table were now beginning to be covered with blood.” In Seq. Thesis 2 there are two past progressive verbs and one simple past. Prominence is given to the simple past which occurs in the second sentence which reports a series of actions by Seddons. The first sentence, which I label Setting brings Seddons into the picture and tells what he was doing prior to his actions given in the second sentence. The third sentence, also with a past progressive verb, reports that simultaneous with the action complex reported in the previous sentence “The odor was beginning to be noticeable.” Thus, in the first two Seq. Theses author Hailey by careful use of tense/aspect distinctions distinguishes punctiliar happenings from concomitant phenomena (sights and smells)! In the third Seq. Thesis Pearson and Seddons are reported as working together; the two sentences which report their joint activities are considered to constitute an embedded Sequence paragraph. Again, the adverb “now” occurs to mark the transition from what each man was doing separately to their embarking on a joint activity. Simple past tense verbs,“tied off ”,“cut”,“turned on”, “began”, and “did” mark the main events which are reported in the two sentences. Grammatical subordination sets off a purpose clause and its related temporal clause: “so the undertaker would have no trouble when it came to embalming” in the first sentence. In the second sentence grammatical subordination sets off the initial participial construction “taking a small tube from a rack above the table” and a relative clause with a pluperfect verb “that had escaped into the abdomen.” Here grammatical subordination is seen to function as a further device — along with tense/ aspect distinctions — for preserving dominant vs. ancillary distinctions and thus forwarding discourse movement at this point. Here morphosyntactic concerns intermesh with textual concerns, so that the latter are seen to have explanatory power in regard to the former.

3.2 Dialogue paragraphs Typically the storyline of a narrative is moved forward not only by sequential punctiliar happenings as reported in narrative paragraphs such as sequence, simultan-

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eous, reason, result, and the like (cf. Longacre 1996.101–122) but in interactional paragraphs (Longacre 1996.123–151). While such interactional paragraph types as execution and stimulus-response are not uncommon (Longacre 1996.136), by and large the commonest type of interactional paragraph is the dialogue paragraph (really a complex of paragraph types). Dialogue paragraphs move the storyline forward by reporting verbal interactions arranged sequentially. In thus moving the storyline forward not only, e.g., is an answer considered to be subsequent to a question, but whole dialogues occur in the sequence of verbal and nonverbal activities. This is perhaps the most common texture of a novel. Reportative verbs, commonly storyline forms like other action verbs, serve to join the reported speech to the storyline, but even in cases of zero formulae of quotation, the reported speech and dialogue usually must be considered to be verbal events on the storyline (Longacre 1994). (3) EP2 (Rinne and Weidman): (N) Comment Para. INTRODUCTION: The autopsy-room doors swung open. THESIS: (N) Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS1: Unresolved Complex Dial. Para. LI:⁴ (N) Comment Para. THESIS: George Rinne, the pathology department’s Negro diener — keeper of the morgue — looked up as the stretcher rolled in. COMMENT: (N) Result Para. THESIS: He had been swabbing the autopsy table. RESULT: Now it shone spotlessly white. IU (Rem): Quote Para. QF: Weidman greeted him with the time-worn jest. QUOTE: “Got a patient for you.” CU (Prop): Quote Para. QF: (N) Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS1: Politely, as if he hadn’t heard the line a hundred times before, Rinne bared his teeth in a perfunctory smile. SEQ. THESISn: He indicated the white enameled table. QUOTE: “Over there.”

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SEQ. THESIS2: (N) Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS1: Wiedman maneuvered the stretcher alongside, and Rinne removed the sheet covering the naked corpse of George Andrew Dunton. SEQ. THESIS2: (N) Reason Para. THESIS: He folded it neatly and handed it back to Weidman. REASON: Death notwithstanding, the sheet would have to be accounted for back in the ward. SEQ. THESISn: Now, with a second drawsheet under the torso, the two men slid the body unto the table. SEQ. THESIS3: (N) Reason Para. THESIS: George Rinne grunted as he took the weight. REASON: This had been a heavy man, a six footer who had run to fat near the end of his life. SEQ. THESISn: Unresolved Complex Dial. Para. IU (Rem): Quote Para. QF: As he wheeled the stretcher clear, Weidman grinned. QUOTE: (P) Reason Para. REASON: “You’re getting old, George.” THESIS: “Be your turn soon.” CU (Rem): Quote Para. QF (or LI?): Rinne shook his head. QUOTE: “I’ll still be here to lift you onto the table.” COMMENT: (E) Coordinate Para. THESIS1: (E) Reason Para. THESIS: The scene ran smoothly. REASON: It had had many performances. THESIS2: (E) Antithetical Para. ANTI:

Holistic textlinguistics

Perhaps in the distant past the two had made their grim little jokes with an instinct to create some barrier between themselves and the death they lived with daily. THESIS: (E) Reason Para. PRELIMINARY: But if so, this was long forgotten. THESIS: Now it was a patter to be run through, a formality expected, nothing more. REASON: They had grown too used to death to feel uneasiness or fear. This example illustrates how dialogue can be integrated with other elements in the presentation of an ongoing flow of events. Looking again at the overview given in Example 1, our present example is Episode 2 of the embedded narrative discourse that expounds Stage of the narrative that constitutes this chapter. The whole example is a Narrative Comment paragraph whose Thesis is expounded by a narrative Sequence paragraph and whose Comment might best be considered to be an expository Coordinate paragraph — since it contains no narrative movement as such but simply explains what precedes. The whole example has an Introduction consisting of the sentence “The autopsy-room door swung open.” In this novel, whose scenes range for the most part through various departments of a hospital, a frequent transition between scenes is a reference to the opening or shutting of doors. The Thesis, expounded by a Narrative Sequence paragraph has, a Lead-In and four Seq.Theses. The LI is expounded by a Narrative Seq. paragraph whose structure need not detain us; it introduces George Rinne and tells us what he was doing when the stretcher, its attendant, and the corpse rolled in. An Initiating Utterance by Weidman consists of a well-worn jest “Got a patient for you.” Rinne does not evaluate this Remark beyond a perfunctory smile, but points to the autopsy table and says “Over there.” I term this dialogue an unresolved complex dialogue paragraph. It is complex because it contains a countertoken instead of a true reply and it is unresolved because no resolving utterance occurs (Longacre 1996.129–131). Seq. Thesis 2 is expounded by an embedded narrative Sequence paragraph whose own second Seq. Thesis is a narrative Reason paragraph — illustrating how the narrator of a story often attaches rationales and explanations to the actions of his characters. In this same embedded Sequence paragraph the third and climactic Seq. Thesis is introduced with that handy transitional adverb “now”. The last Seq. Thesis of the higher level (Seq. Thesis n) is again a dialogue paragraph, again an unresolved complex dialogue paragraph, since as we are told in the following Comment that this is banter rather than serious exchange. Weidman proposes that he will be around to lift Rinne onto the autopsy table someday, but Rinne makes a counter re-

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mark “I’ll be here to lift you onto the table.” So far two of the Seq. Theses have been expounded by dialogue paragraphs, and two by paragraphs not consisting of dialogue. The Comment that follows has two theses: (1) that the scene ran smoothly because it has had many performances, and (2) that although it might have had its rationale in the past (levity in face of death) now it was merely a patter to be run through. Thus the author combines dialogue, non-dialogue, and narrator comment into one harmonious unit. I add two observations: (1) None of the quotations indicate the speaker by a formal formula of quotation, but attribute speech to speaker by more indirect ways (Wares 1993) (2) The conversation runs to short sentences and sentence fragments as befits the nature of the dialogue. Again, lower level grammar waits upon higher level concerns. (4) EP5 (Seddons and McNeil): Compound Dial. Para. INTRODUCTION: (N) Identification Para. THESIS: The autopsy room door swung open and Mike Seddons breezed in. IDENTIFICATION: (E) Coordinate Para. THESIS1: Mike Seddons was a surgical resident, temporarily assigned to Pathology and he always breezed. THESIS2: His red hair stood up in odd places as though a self-created wind would never leave it static. THESIS3: His boyish open face seemed creased permanently in an amiable grin. TERM: McNeil considered Seddons an exhibitionist, though in his favor the kid had taken to pathology a lot more readily than some of the other surgical residents McNeil had seen. EXCHANGE1: Unresolved complex Dial. Para. IU (REM): Quote Para. LI: Seddons looked over at the body on the table. Quote: “Ah, more business.” CU (Prop?): McNeil gestured to the case papers and Seddons picked them up.

Holistic textlinguistics

EXCHANGE2: Resolved simple Dial. Para. IU (Rem): Rh-Q-and-A (N) Sequence Para. SEQ. THESIS1 (Q): He asked: “What did he die of?” SEQ. THESIS2 (A): Then, as he read on “Coronary, eh?” RU (Eval): McNeil answered: “That’s what it says.” EXCHANGE3: Resolved simple Dial. Para. IU (Q): “You doing this one?” RU (A): Quote Para. LI: The resident shook his head. QUOTE: “Pearson’s coming.” EXCHANGE4: Resolved simple Dial. Para. IU (Q): Quote Para. LI: Seddons looked up quizzically. QUOTE: “The boss man himself? What’s special about this case?” RU (A): “Nothing special” EXCHANGE5: Resolved simple Dial. Para. IU (Rem): Quote Para. LI: McNeil snapped a four-page autopsy form into a clipboard. QUOTE: “Some of the student nurses are coming in to watch. I think he likes to impress them.” [Note: (E) Reason Para.: Reason–Thesis] RU (Eval): “A command performance.” EXCHANGE6: Unresolved Complex Dial. Para. IU (Rem): Quote Para. QF: Seddons grinned, QUOTE: “This I must see.” CU (Prop): “In that case you may as well work.”

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EXCHANGE7: Resolved Simple Dial. Para IU (Prop) Quote Para. LI: McNeil passed over the clipboard QUOTE: “Fill in some of this stuff, will you?” RU (Res): “Sure.” SD: Quote Para. LI: Seddons took the clipboard and began to make notes on the condition of the body. QF: He talked to himself as he worked. QUOTE: Coordinate Para. THESIS1: Coordinate Para. THESIS1: “That’s a nice clean appendix scar.” THESIS2: “Small mole on the left arm.” THESIS2: Quote Para. LI: He moved the arm to one side. QUOTE: “Excuse me, old man” THESIS3: He made a note, “Slight rigor mortis.” THESIS4: Lifting the eyelids he wrote, “Pupils round, 0.3 cm. diameter.” THESIS5: He pried the already stiff jaw open, “Let’s have a look at the teeth.” This example, which is even longer than the preceding comes from Episode 5 of the embedded narrative that expounds Stage of the chapter. It has a long introduction and a series of seven exchanges. The long introduction presents Dr. Mike Seddons for the first time; its length may be alerting us to expect the one so introduced to play an important part in the novel. The seven exchanges group together into a compound dialogue paragraph between McNeil and Seddons. Only two of the dialogue paragraphs found in the exchanges are unresolved; in the other dialogue paragraphs there is real communication of information rather than just banter, although something of the latter occurs also.

Holistic textlinguistics

The first exchange is unresolved; Seddons’ attempt at banter (“Ah, more business.”) excites no serious response from McNeil, rather an impatient gesture towards the case papers serves as a proposal that Seddons should get to work. The second exchange is a resolved simple dialogue paragraph. What Seddons says amounts to a remark since he answers his own question as to what the man died of. McNeil’s reply is an evaluation that serves as the resolving utterance. The third exchange is a question regarding who is to perform the autopsy, and the answer is Pearson. Again, we have a question and answer exchange that constitutes a resolved simple dialogue paragraph. The fourth exchange consists of a query from Seddons as to why the bossman himself is doing it, and McNeil has no immediate answer except “Nothing special.” Nevertheless, the exchange has, again, a question-answer structure that makes it a resolved simple dialogue paragraph. The fifth exchange contains a remark followed by an evaluation, which like question and answer constitutes a resolved paragraph. Exchange 6 reflects McNeil’s growing impatience with Seddons, so that when Seddons says ironically “This I must see,” McNeil, equally ironic, says “In that case you might as well work.” The remark followed by a proposal as countertoken leaves the paragraph unresolved, and reflects the fact that little of moment characterizes the transaction. In Exchange7, which may be climactic, McNeil passes a clipboard to Seddons with the request that he fill in some of the needed information. While Seddons’ answer is “Sure” — thus matching the proposal with a response and securing resolution of the paragraph, a step-down unit follows in which Seddons talks to himself as he works. This is reported speech but not dialogue. In this episode of the embedded narrative, dialogue or at least reported speech prevails throughout, and advances the storyline in its own right. Exchanges are tacitly assumed to be successive.

3.3 Paragraphs that encode reflection Moving on down through the material marshalled under caption C in the chart, I now exemplify reflective paragraphs. All that is required in a reflective paragraph is thought (inner speech) without overt verbal activity. Often, but not necessarily, such units function as flashbacks. We have mentioned such a reflective passage in the embedded discourse on Pathology that shaped up in Seddons’ mind as he watched the autopsy proceed. Another such reflective passage is McNeil’s speculation regarding whether he could get Nurse Penfield into bed with him (in Episode 4 of the narrative embedded as stage). In Episode n of the main discourse, there is an embedded narrative whose Episode 2 recounts how a recollection of an injury to her father in the forest in Oregon helps Vivian Lomburton steady herself. I give this, along with its immediate context, as Example 5.

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(5) EP2 [Vivian’s reaction — simultaneous with EP1]: (E) Cyclic Reason Para. THESIS: (E) Amplification Para. THESIS: Vivian was steadier now. AMPL: She believed she had herself in hand. REASON: Awareness Quotation Para. LI: (N) Sequence Para. (backset) SEQ. THESIS1: Near the beginning and when the saw had cut into the dead man’s skull she had felt the blood drain from her head, her senses swim. SEQ. THESIS2: She knew then that she had been close to fainting and had determined not to. AW QF: For no reason she had suddenly remembered an incident in her childhood. AW QUOTE: (N) Result Para. THESIS: (N) Sequence Para. (backset) SEQ. THESIS1: On a holiday, deep in the Oregon forest, her father had fallen on an open hunting knife and cut his leg badly. SEQ. THESIS2: Surprisingly in so strong a man he had quailed at the sight of so much of his own blood and her mother, usually more at home in the drawing room than the woods, had become suddenly strong. SEQ. THESIS3: She had fashioned a tourniquet, stemmed the blood, and sent Vivian running for help. SEQ. THESISn: Then, with Vivian’s father being carried through the woods on an improvised litter of branches, every halfhour she had released the tourniquet to keep circulation going, then tightened it to halt the bleeding again. RESULT: Afterwards the doctors had said she had saved the leg from amputation. THESIS’ (reiterated): After that she knew that there would not be any problem about watching an autopsy again.

Holistic textlinguistics

The paragraph is an expository cyclic reason paragraph; it is cyclic because the thesis to the effect that Vivian now “had herself in hand” brackets the paragraph. The reason given is a remembrance of an incident from her childhood. The Reason is expounded by a structure of the sort that I have found it fruitful to call an “awareness quotation” (abbreviated to “awareness quote”. This terminology suggests itself because of the similarity of constructions involving such verbs as the verb “know” and its complement to the structure of indirect quotations. This paragraph has a lead-in which explains that ‘Near the beginning and when the saw had cut into the dead man’s skull she had felt the blood drain from her head, her senses swim” and she realized “that she had been close to fainting and had determined not to.” The Awareness Quotation Formula involves the verb “remember”: “For no reason she had suddenly remembered an incident in her childhood.” The Awareness Quotation itself is a Narrative Result Paragraph all of whose verbs are pluperfects, thus marking the shift into a flashback. The substance of the recollection, involves her father getting hurt “deep in the Oregon forest”, his dismay, and her mother’s resourcefulness in fashioning a tourniquet, getting her father carried out — and thus saving her father’s leg from amputation. While I will cite no further examples of such structures which encode reflection, I point again to the climax of the novel, as referred to above under Sec. 2 where the string of nine paragraphs on pages 281–3 are all the inner recollections of O’Donnel concerning the impasse to which the Three Counties Hospital had come. We can now summarize the material found in the novel as various strands of content; what the narrator reports is: (1) successive happenings, (2) exposition of happenings, participants, localities, etc., (3) reported speech and dialogue, and (4) reflection/comment on the part of participants or the narrator himself. Of these various content strands, the second has been only incidentally illustrated in the examples above. These four strands make up the interwoven texture of the novel. Some elements are directly on the storyline; others relate to it indirectly. Thus when Mike Seddons reflects about Pathology and why he would never choose to specialize in it, his reflection is attached to the storyline as whole, i.e., at a given juncture in the story, particularly in the progress of the autopsy which is reported in Chapter 3, Mike Seddons has a prolonged reflection about Pathology. His having this reflection is reported as a happening within the story. But the particular points and content of his reflection are not on the story line as such; rather the embedded discourse is attached as a whole to the story, and may be opened up accordion-wise to display its content or be kept as simple attachment. The best analogy is perhaps to a computer program where additional information may be called up which is not necessarily relevant at every stage of the program.

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4. Verb/clause salience and dominance in the local span All the above brings us around to a discussion of what elements dominate a discourse of a given type and a possible ranking of other elements in terms of relative proximity to or distance from the dominating element. I have discussed this at great length in the past (Longacre 1989) with special reference to narrative and with data (initially) from eight languages. I will here simply summarize the scheme relative to English narrative discourse, with a side-glance at a few other discourse types. The hypothesis proposed in the 1989 article was that proximity to the storyline — with the latter as of the highest salience — correlated with dominance in paragraph structures. Simplified somewhat, the salience hierarchy for English narrative is: 1. Storyline: cl.’s with simple past tense> 2. Background: cl’s with past progressive tense/with past tense verbs of cognitive state> 3. Flashbacks: cl’s with pluperfects> 4. Setting: cl’s with stative/adjectival predicates; intr. verbs with inan. subjects> 5. Irrealis: cl’s that are negatives and/or modal> 6. Intrusive author evaluations: cl’s with past tense/gnomic present> 7. Cohesive materials: adverbial clauses, participials. The above scheme is not meant to be an analytical straight jacket. In local context promotion and demotion can occur relative to the scheme. Thus, a punctiliar adverb such as “suddenly” can promote a clause of lower rank to higher, e. g., an element of rank 2 can be thus promoted to rank 1: “Suddenly, he was hanging on as if his life depended on it.” Similarly, for rank 3: “Suddenly he had realized his heart’s desire.” And the same for lower bands short of 6 and 7. Demotion can simply come about by grammatical subordination. The normal storyline scheme is followed in Example 2 above, where in the hierarchical analysis of the paragraph the simple past tense is taken to outrank both the pluperfect (whose clauses are relegated to setting) and the past progressives (whose clauses are relegated to setting in one case, and to simul 2’s in two other cases of foreweighted simultaneous paragraphs). We also noted in the same example demoting occasioned by grammatical subordination. In Example 4 we did not look in detail at the clauses which preceded the onset of dialogue in that paragraph. We now look at them in more detail. The first sentence is “The autopsy-room doors swung open.” This sentence has a verb of rank 4, i.e., an intransitive verb with an inanimate subject; as a comparatively low ranking element it is assigned to Introduction to the entire episode where it clearly fits semantically as well. The three sentences found in the lead-in structure are mutually ranked. The first sentence with the verb “looked up” is storyline. The second “had been swabbing”

Holistic textlinguistics

is pluperfect past progressive which we probably can consider to be in rank 3. By making it Thesis of a Comment it is lower than the main Thesis on which the Comment depends but higher than the Result structure which follows: “Now it shone spotlessly white.” The latter verb is again an intransitive verb with an inanimate subject — as are many descriptives; as rank 4 it is outranked by the preceding sentence. This, of course, also squares with the semantics where the practical result of swabbing should be a clean surface.. Example 5 is somewhat different. To begin with it is not narrative in its outermost layers but explanatory, i.e., it is describing Vivian’s feelings. In this explanatory structure static elements outrank the dynamic — quite the opposite of narrative structure. So, the Thesis and the reiterated Thesis at the end of the paragraph are dominate as static elements, but the Reason as a dynamic element is ancillary. It has the structure of a narrative sequence paragraph with two stages of backlooping. In the lead-in it is explained that Vivian had been close to fainting but had gotten herself in hand due to a recollection of an incident in her childhood. The content of the Awareness Quote gives a second stage flashback (recollection of an incident in Vivian’s childhood) that has the structure of a narrative sequence paragraph whose verbs are pluperfect. There is a consistent verb dominance here (although the flip structure from narrative), with the pluperfects on the embedded storyline and the whole thing surrounded by the thematic static material. Again, I repeat, all this is the inverse of narrative salience ranking — where the static outranks the dynamic. The sequence paragraph in the flashback does not link up with the main line of the story; rather it relates to it as a whole simply on the grounds that Vivian had a recollection which helped her steady herself. Conclusion: Verb ranking and relative salience — as well other features noted here and there in this chapter tie up the analysis of the text so that lower level concerns are constrained by higher level concerns, and higher level concerns build on and are realized by the lower levels. From the template proper to a type and the macrostructure characteristic of a given text and from its particular profile, a variety of constraints influence the consitutent structure — whose purpose is, of course, to develop the strategy and various ploys of the text. The text displays a movement in its structure, the movement of its main line, but attachments are possible here and there that enhance the main text and relate as wholes to it. Our goal is therefore a kind of holistic textlinguistics, which knits together a text in all its dimensions. Perhaps this is still somewhat more of a goal than a reality but traveling hopefully down this road we can discover many things we couldn’t see if we were standing still!

5. Integration with a morphosyntax informed by textual concerns Considerations such as we have developed and illustrated here suggest that textlinguistics should not be considered to be merely a supplement to the morphosyntax but that the study of the two should be integrated or at least considered to be closely

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related modules. Many elements in the morphosyntax can be and should be illuminated by resort to textual structures. While not every element in the structure of words, clauses, and sentences directly relates to such larger structures, a surprising amount of them do so relate, specifically, the teaching of the verb structure of a language, its tense, aspect, tense, and mood can be greatly enriched by recourse to discourse concerns. With the evidence that has continued to accumulate along these lines, it can now be said attempts to teach the verb system of a language without resort to text is unnecessary obscurantism. Why should French teachers belabor the teaching of the meaning and function of the imparfait, when a few paragraphs of French narrative would illuminate most of the mystery? And why have we wrangled for close to 200 years about the tense-aspects of Biblical Hebrew when a similar resort to text (as is now underway from various quarters) could similarly shed light on the whole tangle? Why should whole schools of grammar continue to flourish and revise their elaborate and elegant frameworks at regular intervals and continue to ignore textual concerns? My deep conviction is that textlinguistics should enter into fieldwork at an early stage, should form an integral part in the teaching of linguistics and languages at our various institutions, and should be allowed to illumine old controversies.

Appendix A. Chart of interrelationships of textual factors A. → → → B.

Text type and its template* macrostructure of given text profile of its surface structure recursion of text type within same/diff type Constituents of text (domain of cognitive/rhetorical interclausal relations) (Structural) Paragraphs [also recursive] Constituents of paragraphs: sentences and clauses. Intraparagraph relations [whether Longacre or Mann-Thompson] C. Constraints on constituents (B ← A) Non-interactive vs. Interactive (e.g. dialogue) paragraphs Reflective Paragraphs (Flashback in Narrative) Verb/Clause Salience (Longacre 1989) D. Exit to a morphosyntax informed by A, B, and C. *It cannot be assumed that all text types have templates; apparently lyric poems do not.

Appendix B. Abbreviations found in dialogue and quotation paragraphs IU RU CU

Initiating utterance Resolving utterance Continuing utterance

LI SD

Lead-in Step-down

Holistic textlinguistics QF Q AQF AQ

Quotation formula Quotation Awareness quotation formula Awareness quotation

Rh-Q-and-A

Rhetorical question and answer

(Q) (Prop) (Rem) (A) (Res) (Ev)

Question Proposal Remark Answer Response Evaluation

Notes 1. By permission of Arthur Hailey. 2. By recursion I mean simply the occurrence of a construction on a given structural level within another construction on the same level, e.g., discourse within discourse, paragraph within paragraph, sentence within sentence, etc. (Longacre 1996.276–284) 3. I acknowledge here the help of Stephen Echerd in the formatting of my presentation of Chapter 3. 4. For abbreviations used in dialogue paragraph, see Appendix B.

References Dry, H. n.d. “Deictic Now : The Great Gatsby as Case Study” Hailey, A. 1959. The Final Diagnosis. New York: Doubleday and Co. Hoey, M. 1983. On the Surface of Discourse. London: Allen and Unwin. Lewis, C. S. 1942. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press Longacre, R. 1979a. “Why we need a vertical revolution in linguistics”. The Fifth LACUS Forum 1978, 427–270. Columbia SC: Hornbeam Press. Longacre, R. 1979b. “The paragraph as a grammatical unit.” In T. Givón (ed.), Discourse and Semantics, Syntax and Semantics 12, 115–134. New York: Academic Press. Longacre, R. 1989. “Two hypotheses regarding text generation and analysis.” Discourse Processes 12: 413–460. Longacre, R. 1990. Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology in East and West Africa. Studies in African Linguistics. Supplement 10. Los Angeles: The James F. Coleman Studies Center and the Dept. of Linguistics, University of California. Longacre, R. 1994. “The dynamics of reported dialogue in narrative.” Word 45: 125–143. Longacre, R. 1996. The Grammar of Discourse, second edition. New York: Plenum Press. Longacre, R. and F. Woods (eds.), 1976–7. Discourse Grammar: Studies in indigenous languages of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. Parts 1–3. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publication 53. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Mann, W. and S. Thompson. 1993. Relational Propositions in Discourse, Technical Report ISI/ RR-83–115 Marina del Rey, CA: Information Sciences Institute.

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Robert E. Longacre Mann, W. and S. Thompson. 1987a. Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organization. Technical Reports ISI/RS 87–190. Marina del Rey, CA: Information Sciences Institute. Mann, W. and S. Thompson,1987b. “Rhetorical structure theory: A framework for analysis of texts.” International Pragmatics Association: Papers in Pragmatics 1: 79–105. Miehle, Helen. 1978. “Linguistic markers of climax in The Final Diagnosis.” University of Texas at Arlington, unpublished paper. van Dijk, T. 1977. Text and Context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. London: Longman. van Dijk, T. 1980. Macrostructures. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Ware, J. 1993. “Quote Formulae in The Final Diagnosis.” Journal of Translation and Textlinguistics 6: 161–178. Williams, M. 1978. “Cohesion among the plots in Arthur Hailey’s The Final Diagnosis.” University of Texas at Arlington, unpublished paper.

CHAPTER 3

Discourse effects of polysynthesis Wallace Chafe University of California, Santa Barbara

“Les Iroquois n’ont presque pas d’adjectifs; . . . Ils manquent d’articles, et ils ne sauraient parer à ce défaut d’articles ni par des cas, ni par des prépositions, dont ils sont également dépourvus. Toutefois ils ont d’autres moyens d’y suppléer et de maintenir par là la clarté du discours. . . . Ils ne possèdent que peu d’adverbes et de conjonctions, mais ils sont d’une richesse étonnante en fait de verbes. Dans leur langue, presque tout est verbe ou peut le devenir.” (Cuoq 1866: 87). (The Iroquois have hardly any adjectives; . . . They don’t have articles, and they wouldn’t know how to compensate for this lack of articles either with case or with prepositions, which they also lack. Nevertheless, they have other ways of establishing and maintaining clarity of discourse. . . . They have only a few adverbs and conjunctions, but in fact they have an astonishing richness of verbs. In their language almost everything is a verb, or can become one.)

I will be discussing two languages, English and Seneca. Seneca is an Iroquoian language that is highly endangered. At best there might be a hundred more or less fluent speakers living on three separate reservations in western New York State: the Tonawanda Reservation east of Buffalo, the Cattaraugus Reservation southwest of Buffalo, and the Allegany Reservation further south that includes the city of Salamanca. I have been working with this language, off and on, for more than forty years. It has always seemed to me as unlike English as a language could be. I have had that feeling, in part, because at various times I have tried to translate from Seneca into English, and I have found the task particularly frustrating. When I published some Seneca ritual speeches with translations (Chafe 1961), I followed my intuitions in looking for English ways of saying things that I thought would more or less capture the thoughts expressed in Seneca, but I was never very satisfied with what I came up with. I suspect that conscientious translators are never wholly satisfied, but the task is especially hard when the two languages are as different as these two. I have tried in various ways at various times to pin down more precisely how Seneca and English differ, both in the thoughts they express and in the ways they express them. Here I will discuss just a few of these differences. The bottom line will be that Seneca discourse is very much intertwined with its morphology, with the result that its discourse patterns and its morphology cannot be understood in independence of each other. If you approach Seneca from an English point of view, it is tempting to ask how a language can get along without a copula, without either prepositions or postpos-

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itions, without adjectives, and without case in the usual sense. The answer is fairly well stated in the quotation that begins this article. Jean André Cuoq was a missionary who was writing about the Mohawk language in the middle of the nineteenth century. What he said about Mohawk applies to Seneca as well. Especially revealing is the end of the excerpt — “In their language almost everything is a verb” — and in fact what I will be discussing here are some of the discourse effects of packing a great deal of information into verbs. I can anticipate what I am going to say by showing how Seneca expresses a thought that in English might seem to call for both a copula and a preposition, neither of which Seneca has. Recently I made use of a picture book that had been constructed by Melissa Bowerman in order to elicit spatial expressions in a variety of languages (cf. Bowerman 1996). I showed the pictures to a Seneca speaker, Myrtle Peterson, who was happy to respond to them in Seneca. I have reproduced one of them in (1), with what I think are reasonable English and Seneca descriptions of it just below the picture. I am assuming that an English speaker, looking at this picture, might say, “The dog is next to the doghouse.” Below the English I have given Mrs. Peterson’s Seneca. (1) English copula and prepositional phrase, but Seneca verbs

English: The dog is next to the doghouse. Seneca: Honhsakʔá hanyóhšo:t né ji:yæh. -nyohšot- -0 ho-nǫhs- -ak- -ʔah haMASC.PAT house near DIM MASC.AGT sitting STAT next to his house he’s sitting the dog ‘The dog is sitting next to his house.’ In fact, these are rather artificial sentences in both languages. Both sound as if they were elicited responses to a picture — which they were. It is not the most typical use of language to be talking about something when both the speaker and the audience are looking at it. But if we can accept that limitation, the point I want to make is that Seneca does not have anything that corresponds to the English word ‘is’ or the preposition ‘next to’. The first word in the Seneca sentence contains a stative verb root that means ‘be next to’, which is actually a diminutive form of a simpler verb root that means ‘be near’; in other words ‘being next to’ is the diminutive of ‘being near’. The same word contains an incorporated noun root meaning ‘house’. At the beginning of that word the prefix ho- shows alienable possession by some masculine being. The word as a whole can be translated ‘next to his house’. That is the location suggested by the picture. The entity that is located is of course the dog, as expressed in the last

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

two Seneca words, né ji:yæh. But whereas English can be satisfied with relating the dog and his location with just the copula ‘is’, Seneca must use a more explicit verb, in this case one that expresses the posture of the dog. The second word of the Seneca says the dog was sitting. It is not necessary to say that in English. Of course we can also say ‘The dog is sitting next to his house’, but my point is that the other English sentence, ‘The dog is next to the doghouse’, cannot be directly replicated in Seneca. But there is another point that can be made with this example, and it is one I will discuss at greater length below. The participation of the dog, both in his location next to his house and in his sitting posture, were introduced in the first two Seneca words. From those two words we know of the involvement of a masculine singular participant in being next to something and in sitting. As a result, the function of the word né ji:yæh ‘the dog’ at the end is only to provide additional information about an entity that was already introduced — to characterize further something that was already present in the two verbs at the beginning. As we will see, this is not simply a matter of Seneca requiring a verb-first word order. I believe there are good reasons to suppose that the thoughts expressed in language are organized around what I have been calling ideas, using that word as a technical term (Chafe 1994: 80). Ideas, in this special sense, are mental representations that make up the fundamental units of thought. There is evidence for three distinct kinds of ideas. First, there are ideas of events and states — things that happen and the way things are, like sitting or being next to something. Second, there are ideas of the participants in those events and states — ideas of people and things, in (2) of the dog. We can call those kinds of ideas referents. Third, there are more encompassing ideas — larger chunks of information we can call topics (Chafe 1994: 120–136). Topics cannot be focused on all at once, but must be navigated with a succession of smaller ideas, separate foci of consciousness. One of the artificialities of the sentences in (1) was the fact that they were not part of a topic, but we will meet some topics now. Spoken language is realized as a sequence of prosodic phrases, or intonation units, each of which may express a focus on the idea of a particular event or state, or occasionally on nothing more than a referent — a participant in an event or state. I can illustrate this point with the sequence of intonation units in (2), from the beginning of a Seneca story. (2) The beginning of a Seneca story a. Né:ʔ nǽ gyʔ nónęhji wá:hdę:dí wa- ha-ahtęti- -ʔ FACT MASC.AGT set.out PFV assertion emphasis it is said long ago he set out gyǫʔǫ néh, it is said (colon) ‘It is said that long ago he set out,’

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b. hǫgwéh, man ‘a man,’ c. i:é gyʔ néh, ih-e- -h (empty) MASC.AGT think STAT he thinks it is said (colon) ‘he thought’ d. gǫshéʔda:ni:nʔ, ę- hagǫ- -sheʔda- -hninǫ- -ʔ PRED he/them bottle buy PFV he will buy them a bottle ‘he would buy them a bottle,’ e. we:ęhjí gyʔ hę:eʔ. hę- h-e- -:ʔ TRANSLOC PRED MASC.AGT go PFV very far it is said he will go there ‘he will go very far.’ f. Da on oʔthátha:k nǽ: gyǫʔǫh. oʔ- tha-athahkw- -ʔ FACT DUALIC MASC.AGT walk PFV so then he walked emphasis it is said ‘So then he walked.’ A more or less adequate free translation might be as in (3). (3) Free English translation of (2) Once there was a man who set out, thinking he’d buy people a bottle. He’d have to go a long way. So he started walking. But (3) is not at all a literal translation, and a literal translation of the Seneca would not be very good English. (3) may be reasonably satisfactory as English, but there are various ways in which it fails to reflect the Seneca directly. Here I will emphasize one of the differences, but first I will mention a few others. The information-laden Seneca words that express events and states are surrounded by smaller words, or particles, that provide various kinds of orientations on those events or states. The seven words in the first intonation unit of (2) include only one event, the ‘setting out’ expressed in the fifth word, wá:hdę:diʔ. The first word ne:ʔ is impossible to translate adequately. An attempt at a literal translation might be ‘it is’, as in (4). (4) Uses of ne:ʔ Né:ʔ waih. it is indeed ‘That’s right.’

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

Né:ʔ nǫ:h. it is I guess ‘I guess so.’ When this ne:ʔ is followed, later in the same intonation unit, by a verb expressing an event, as in the first line of (2), it might be translated ‘it is the case that (such and such happened)’, but that is awkward English. The force of ne:ʔ is to say that what follows is an assertion, and English has nothing that corresponds to it directly. The second word in (2) is the particle næ:, which provides an emphasis or highlighting that would show up in English with a higher pitch on the preceding word, as is illustrated better in (2f), where the effect of the næ: would be captured in spoken English by raising the pitch on the word walked — so then he walked. This næ: is a good example of a particle in one language that corresponds to a prosodic pattern in another. Discourse in many languages of both North and South America is sprinkled throughout with indications of epistemology: indications, first, of how speakers know what they are talking about and, second, of how they evaluate its correspondence with what they perceive to be reality. These concerns are manifested in different ways in different languages (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Here one can notice that the first intonation unit in (2) contains two instances of the particle gyǫʔǫh (the h being lost before a following word), and in fact as many as four of the six intonation units contain at least one instance of that word. It is a so-called hearsay evidential which shows that the speaker did not directly experience what he was talking about, but heard it from someone else. In an English translation it would be possible to sprinkle something like ‘it is said’ in all the same places, as I have done in (5), but although (5) is a more literal translation, it does not make good English. (5) An English translation of (2) with gyǫʔǫh translated ‘it is said’ Once it is said there was a man who set out it is said, thinking it is said he’d buy people a bottle. He’d have to go a long way it is said. So he started walking it is said. There is another way epistemology is frequently expressed in Seneca discourse. Verbs in the perfective (PFV) aspect, like those in lines (a), (d), (e), and (f), must include a so-called modal prefix. The perfective aspect cannot occur without such a prefix. There are three of them, and they express points on a scale of reality, ranging from factual through predictive to hypothetical. Something is regarded as a fact, or as something expected to become a fact (translatable with either a future or an imperative), or as something that is simply imagined as a possibility (translatable with ‘might’). The verbs in lines (a) and (f) of (2) contain the factual prefix, those in lines (d) and (e) the predictive prefix. One can see that the events in the first and last lines — ‘he set out’ and ‘he walked’ — were presented as facts, whereas the events in (d) and (e) were predicted for the future — ‘he will buy them a bottle’ and ‘he will go there’. I translated the factual Seneca verbs with English verbs in the past tense

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and the predictive verbs with the future, but in Seneca it was not tense that was involved but placement on the scale of reality. English is forced to replace epistemology with tense. In more general terms, Seneca speakers, when they think about an event, immediately and unconsciously associate it with how they know about it and with the extent to which it accords with their perception of reality, whereas English speakers immediately and unconsciously associate it with its temporal relation to the time of speaking. That is not to say that Seneca speakers are unaware of time. The fourth word in (2a) was a temporal adverb, translated ‘long ago’. It served to orient the entire story in the distant past. Everything from then on was understood to have taken place at that distant time. Seneca had no need to keep repeating the temporal orientation on every verb, as English must. Seneca verbs are often inflected with an indication of space, as can be seen in line (2e) in the verb hę:eʔ ‘he will go there’, where the h- at the beginning is the so-called translocative prefix, showing that the motion would take place in a direction away from the point of reference, not toward it. In this case a similar distinction is captured in English lexically, with the choice of ‘go’ rather than ‘come’ — ‘he’d have to go a long way’ — but the Seneca usage is inflectional, not lexical, and is more pervasive. A little further along came the sequence in (6). (6) A continuation of (2) a. jigwás :ʔ, soon pretty ‘pretty soon’ b. hę:ǫyʔ néh, hę- ha-yǫ- -ʔ TRANSLOC PRED MASC.AGT arrive PFV he’ll arrive (colon) ‘he’ll arrive’ c. tgagoseh. tga-goseh CISLOC NEUT.AGT grocery at the store ‘at the store.’ The translocative prefix h- appeared at the beginning of the verb in (6b), showing that the arrival would be at some distant place. The same interest in space appears in the fact that the word in (6c) began with the so-called cislocative prefix t-, translatable here as simply ‘at (the store)’, or perhaps more accurately ‘where the store is’ (cf. Abbott 1981). Although location in time does not need to be constantly reinforced in Seneca as it does in English, sequencing in time is marked at least as often. Cuoq’s statement above was not quite right in saying that the Iroquoian languages have only a few adverbs and conjunctions. In (2f), which introduced a new subtopic (a shift of inter-

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

est to the protagonist’s walking), this shift was signaled by the initial phrase da onę ‘so then’. The first line of (6) shows a temporal link provided by the phrase jigwás ę:ʔ ‘pretty soon’. Seneca establishes events in time with adverbs like ónęhjih ‘long ago’, and it links them in time as we have just seen, but it does not constantly reinforce their time with every verb. Seneca verbal inflection shows a pervasive interest, not just in epistemology and space, but also in aspect. Every Seneca verb ends with an aspect suffix. So far as their form is concerned, there are only three such suffixes. Those three forms, however, express five different aspectual meanings that are distributed somewhat differently depending on the meaning of the verb (Chafe 1980). With event verbs one of the options is the perfective aspect, in which the event is viewed as an undifferentiated whole. We saw such verbs in (2a), (d), (e), and (f), and also in (6b). There is no way to translate directly into English the meaning of the Seneca perfective aspect as such. On the other hand another aspect is the so-called stative, which in (2c) has a progressive function that can be translated fairly adequately ‘he was thinking’. It is interesting to notice in passing the expression of an indirect thought in (2d), where the buyer of the bottle was presented from the point of view of the narrator, not of the person who was actually doing the thinking. That person would have thought, ‘I will buy them a bottle’. Here it is ‘he will buy them a bottle’. The correspondence with English expressions of indirect thought is close, except that the Seneca absence of tense inflection is reflected in the absence of anything that would correspond to the English past tense in ‘he would buy them a bottle’. It is also relevant that, aside from the simple categorization in (2b), (2d) is the only intonation unit in (2) that does not contain the hearsay particle gyǫʔǫh. The idea of buying a bottle was part of the protagonist’s own experience, not something he had heard about. It is, in fact, this absence of gyǫʔǫh that makes it unambiguously clear that (2d) is an indirect thought of the protagonist and not something reported from the outside by the narrator. Conversely, the presence of gyǫʔǫh in (2e) makes it clear that the idea of his going very far was not a continuation of the indirect thought, but in this case was a comment by the narrator. Whereas Seneca may be more explicit than English with regard to epistemology, space, and aspect, I have sometimes felt the need to be specific in English translations in ways that go beyond the Seneca original. Line (2d) provides an example. d. ęǫgǫshéʔda:ni:nʔ, he will buy them a bottle ‘he would buy people a bottle,’ We know from the verb that there were two human participants in this predicted event: the agent and the recipient of the buying. Nowhere in the story were those recipients characterized further, and they were of minimal interest. In English, however, saying simply ‘he would buy them a bottle’ at the beginning of the story would have been inadequate. As English speakers we need to know a little more about ‘them’. In (3) I added what seemed the minimum by saying he would buy ‘people’

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something. Evidently ‘he’d buy people a bottle’ is not much more informative than ‘he’d buy them a bottle’, but English does not like to have pronouns introduced without some anaphoric or cataphoric clarification with a full noun. There will be more to say on this point below. In a different way, the incorporated noun root meaning ‘bottle’ also provided less information than English seems to tolerate. I was myself uncertain about this bottle, and was told by several Seneca speakers who listened to the story that it was undoubtedly a bottle of whiskey or some other strong drink. It is relevant here, in accordance with Mithun (1984), that incorporation is a type of compounding. Contrary to what some have suggested, it is not a productive placement of a core argument within the morphology of the verb. A more literal translation here would be ‘he will bottle-buy for them’, but in English we lack the lexicalized expression ‘bottlebuy’. The translation ‘he would buy people a bottle’ distorts the Seneca by presenting the bottle as a full-fledged referential argument of the buying. English must do that, but it is not what is present in the original. But the most often encountered example of what might seem to be a lack of specificity in Seneca is the one to which I will now return at greater length. It results from the basic nature of Seneca verbs. I have said that people think in terms of ideas of events and states along with the participants in those events and states. For the most part people focus on events and states for relatively brief intervals, so that discourse tends to consist of a succession of intonation units expressing a sequence of them, each replaced in focal consiousness by the next. With the exception of (2b), hǫgweh ‘a man’, all the intonation units in (2) expressed events: (2a) the event of setting out, (2c) the event of thinking, (2d) the event of bottle-buying, (2e) the event of going, and (2f) the event of walking. In contrast to these ideas of events, the ideas of the participants in them can remain in focal consciousness for longer periods. The idea of the protagonist in this narrative remained active not only throughout the sequence in (2), but throughout the story. Sometimes consciousness focuses on a particular referent alone, as was the case in (2b), the idea of the man. But it is evidently impossible to focus on an event without including the idea of one or more of its participants. I may be able to think of my dog without necessarily narrowing down my thinking to any particular event in which she took part. But I cannot think of any of those events without including the idea of my dog as part of them. That is a major difference between events and referents. In summary, so far as events are concerned, they are constantly being replaced with ideas of other events, and it is impossible to separate events from the referents that participate in them. The chief defining feature of at least many polysynthetic languages is the fact that they present ideas of events and states as wholes. They include within a single word, not just a categorization of the event or state, but also references to its core participants. One might say that these polysynthetic verbs provide a holistic expression of an event or state — holistic in the sense of including its participants within the same word, whereas analytic verbs, like those of English, express only a categorization of

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

the event, leaving its participants to be expressed in separate noun phrases or pronouns. It is a difference with discourse consequences. Especially interesting in this regard is the discourse pattern at the point where a new topic has been introduced, as in (2). The typical pattern with a language like English is to focus first on an important referent, one that will remain active during part or all of the topic, before that referent is involved as a participant in a series of events. That is why I found it most natural to begin my translation of (2) as I did in (3) with the phrase ‘once there was a man’, followed then by the idea of the first event in which he participated: ‘once there was a man who set out’. The Seneca way of opening topics is different. The first intonation unit, (2a), moved immediately after the particles to activating the idea of an event, wá:hdę:diʔ ‘he set out’. From that word it was already known, not only that there was an event categorizable as an instance of setting out, but also that it was an event performed by a masculine singular agent. From a Seneca point of view (2a) contained almost enough information to allow the story to proceed with a series of other events involving this participant. But although we already know from this first verb alone that the person who set out was a single male, this speaker found it advisable to add more of a characterization in (2b), where the person was identified as hǫgweh ‘a man’, which said little more than was already present in the verb. That pattern is typical of much Seneca discourse: first to activate the idea of an event as a whole, already including its core participant, and then to characterize that participant further in a following intonation unit. It is also typical to anticipate the added characterization with the particle neh, as at the end of (2a). This neh was probably once a demonstrative, but it has taken on several other functions, including that of a definite article. We saw such a usage at the end of (1) — né ji:yæh ‘the dog’ (where the final h of neh was elided). Here, however, it could be translated as if it were a colon, as suggested in (2), translatable roughly as ‘the following’ — in a long-winded paraphrase, ‘I’m about to characterize more fully the nature of the core participant in the event I just told you about’. That is what neh means here. This neh is sometimes postponed to the following intonation unit. When that happens, one gains the impression that the additional characterization was more of an afterthought and not something already anticipated at the end of the first intonation unit. Example (7) comes from the same narrative, after the protagonist realized that the people he stayed with overnight were killing other people who stopped with them. The verb hǫwǫdinyos in (7a) included the information that both the agents and the victims of the killing were plural, but then (7b) went on to clarify who the victims were, in case that was unclear from the context.

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(7) neh postponed to the second line. a. Neʔhó n: nya:diye:háʔ hǫwǫdinyós, ni- hadi-ye- -haʔ hǫwǫdi- -nyo- -s PART MASC.PL.AGT do HAB they/them kill HAB that I guess what they do they kill them ‘I guess what they do is kill them,’ b. néh nekhó:gwa: hodíęʔhésthaʔ. hodi-hęʔhest- -haʔ MASC.PL.PAT stop HAB the this way they stop ‘the ones who stop here.’ But (7) also provides two illustrations of another important feature of holistic verbs. What is expressed by such a verb does not need to be the idea of the event itself, as was the case in (2); it may instead be the idea of a participant in the event. That is the function of the verb at the end of (7b), where the focus was on the referent, ‘those who stop’, and not on the event of stopping. The best way to translate such verbs into English may be with a relative clause, ‘the ones who stop’, but Seneca has no relative clauses. It is quite common for Seneca verbs to express referents rather than events, a usage that throws a special light on the holistic nature of these verbs: the fact that the participants in the events are just as much a part of them as the events themselves, since the same verb can equally well express the idea of a participant. Although it may not be as obvious, the first of the two verbs in (7a), nya:diye:haʔ, functions in the same way. The verb by itself means ‘they do it’, but the focus in (4a) is not on the doing itself, but on what was done, and so the best translation is ‘what they do’. The sufficiency of a holistic verb — the fact that it contains, up to a point, everything that needs to be said about an event — is especially noticeable where a speaker finds it unnecesssary to give any further characterization at all, where the identification of a participant that is included in the verb is all that is needed. Example (8) shows the beginning of another story. (8) No characterization beyond the holistic verb a. Né:ʔ gyǫʔǫ nónęhji wáónǫhgwáge:eyáʔs. assertion it is said long ago wa- ho- -nǫhgwa- -geheya- -ʔs -0 FACT MASC.PAT spouse die DAT PFV his wife died ‘Long ago his wife died.’ b. Da onę ó:yaʔ sa:onya:k, s- a- ho- -nyak- -0 REP FACT MASC.PAT marry PFV so then another he married again ‘So then he married another,’

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

c.

hoksáʔdayʔ gyǫʔ gwaʔhoh. ho- -ksaʔda- -yę- -ʔ MASC.PAT child have STAT he has a child it is said from before ‘having a child from before.’

An English translation of (8) might read as in (9): (9) Free English translation of (8) Long ago there was a man whose wife died. So then he married someone else, having a child from his first marriage. As was the case with (2), in the English it seemed necessary to introduce the idea of the man before focusing on the event in which he participated: ‘there was a man’. Example (8) is like (2), except that this speaker found it unnecessary to add an intonation unit like (2b), characterizing the participant as a man. If there is a functional difference between the two cases, it may be that the man in (2) was the protagonist throughout that story, whereas the most important character in the story introduced in (8) was the man’s daughter, the child who was introduced indirectly in (8c), and so there was less need to provide any information about the father beyond what was contained in the verb in (8a). Perhaps, then, it is possible to identify a scale of interest in the qualities of a referent as measured by how much attention is given to characterizing that referent after its introduction with a holistic verb. On such a scale of interest, the absence of any characterization, as in (8), would show a lack of interest. The provision of a brief but not very informative characterization, as in (2b), would represent a kind of mid-level interest. At the opposite extreme from (8) would be a case like the one to be discussed next. The speaker of (10) was telling how, when she was a little girl, her mother sent her off to church. In (10a) she concluded that subtopic by saying she went there. (10a) was uttered with reduced pitch and volume, appropriate for the conclusion of a subtopic. (10b) then opened a new subtopic by introducing a state in which a male human was alone. If the situation here were like that in (2), where a minimal characterization of this man would have been enough, the speaker might have followed the neh at the end of (10b) with nothing more than hǫgweh, ‘a man’, as in (2b). But instead of that, in (10c) she repeated the particle negęʔ, translated ‘specifically’, which anticipates a more informative characterization. Then came, first, in (10d), the fact that his name was Harley Blinkey, and in (10e) that he was old and an Indian. After the response from her interlocutor in (10f), she went on to involve him in a defining event in (10g), identifying him as a preacher.

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(10) Elaborate characterization of referent a. Da: neʔho negęʔ hoʔge:ʔ. hoʔ- g- -e- -:ʔ TRANSLOC FACT I go PFV so there specifically I went there ‘And so there I went.’ b. Haʔdà:yáʔdí: næ: negęʔ hadeha-yaʔd- -i-:h TRANSLOC DUALIC MASC.AGT body number STAT he was alone emphasis specifically néh, (colon) ‘He was alone,’ c. negʔ. ‘specifically.’ d. Hàrley Blínkey hayásǫ:nǫʔ. ha-yas-ǫh -nǫʔ MASC.AGT be.called STAT PAST Harley Blinkey he was called ‘His name was Harley Blinkey.’ e. Haghjí ǫgwéʔǫ:weh. ha-gęhji- -h ǫgwe- -ʔǫweh MASC.AGT old STAT person real he was old Indian ‘He was an old Indian.’ f. Mm. (from interlocutor) næ `: dá:dętha:has. g. Da né:ʔ de- ha- -adę- -tha- -has- -0 DUALIC MASC.AGT MIDDLE talk DAT PFV so assertion emphasis he preached ‘So he preached.’ A possible translation of this segment is given in (11): (11) English translation of (10) There was an old Indian named Harley Blinkey who was there alone. He was a preacher. Here I have put the several characterizations of the man first, followed by the state of his being alone, followed then by a separate statement of his occupation. To summarize, a referent that is being activated for the first time may be treated either as sufficiently identified by nothing more than its inclusion in a holistic verb

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

as in (8), or by a minimal and not very informative characterization as in (2), or by a whole series of characterizations as in (10). What all these examples have in common is the fact that a holistic event or state was presented first, and then was judged either to require or not to require additional information about its participant. All of this does not imply that a Seneca speaker never mentions a participant before mentioning an event. I will discuss now two cases that show a pattern opposite to that discussed so far. The first such case is shown in (12). (12) Contrastive participant before event a. Né:ʔ næ: néh, assertion emphasis (colon) ‘It was:’ b. haʔní né:ʔ negʔ wáóhsadǫ:ʔ. wa- ho-hsadǫ- -:ʔ FACT MASC.PAT bury PFV father assertion specifically he buried him ‘it was father who buried him.’ The event was expressed in the verb at the end of (12b), wáóhsadǫ:ʔ ‘he buried him’. But the one who did the burying was introduced first. The difference between this case and those represented in (2), (8), and (10) is clear. In (12) the idea of the father was already accessible; he had already been talked about repeatedly in this conversation. The point of (12) was that it was father, not some other member of the family, who had buried the person in question. The newsworthy element in (12) was the contrastive choice of father rather than someone else, and so that idea was presented first. In the earlier examples, where the event came first, it was the event itself that was maximally newsworthy. Possibly more at odds with what I have said so far is an example like that in (13). The speaker had visited the local clinic, and when he entered the waiting room he ran into an old friend named Mike, someone he had not seen for a while. (13) Participant first Míke thanyóhšo:t. tha-nyohšo:t- -0 CISLOC MASC.AGT sitting STAT Mike he is sitting there ‘Mike was sitting there.’ There followed a discussion of the speaker’s conversation with Mike, who had not been talked about before. Why did the speaker not say something parallel to (2), something that might have been translatable literally as ‘he was sitting there, specifically Mike’? In (14) I have invented such an alternative, but it would not have been appropriate in this context.

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(14) Invented alternative to (12) a. Né:ʔ thanyóhšo:t negęʔ néh, tha-nyohšo:t- -0 CISLOC MASC.AGT sitting STAT assertion he’s sitting there s pecifically (colon) ‘He was sitting there,’ b. Míke haya:sǫh. ha-yas-ǫh MASC.AGT be.called STAT Mike he is called ‘he’s called Mike.’ ‘A guy named Mike was sitting there.’ There are several reasons why (13) was more appropriate than (14). First, although the idea of Mike was new to this conversation, he was a person who was well known to both the speaker and his listener. The speaker did not need to introduce someone named Mike who was unknown to his listener, as was true of Harley Blinkey in (10), for example. But in addition to that, the idea of his sitting there was not a newsworthy new idea in itself. Its function was to introduce the idea of Mike. It was unimportant whether he was sitting, standing, or lying. What was important was simply that he was there. In other words, the way of introducing a new referent that is illustrated in (13) is appropriate if the referent is familiar and identifiable, and if the verb is a presentative verb that lacks the independent newsworthiness that was a property of the verbs in (2) — ‘he set out’, or in (8) — ‘his wife died’, or in (10) — ‘he was alone’. It was the newsworthiness of those events or states that was responsible for their initial positions. That is the position regularly allotted to newsworthy events in Iroquoian languages as opposed to English, where the most newsworthy ideas are saved for last. The invented version in (14) gives too much prominence to the sitting, presenting it up front as if it were important, while at the same time treating Mike as if he were not known to the listener. I wrote about this difference in the positioning of newsworthy information in (Chafe 1994: 156–59), and I will close by mentioning and illustrating two other points discussed there. We can return to the beginning of (2), which I have reproduced in skeletal form in (15), omitting some of the particles. This example raises two more questions involving information flow. (15) Skeletal version of (2a) and (2b) a. Né:ʔ . . . wá:hdę:dí . . . néh, wa- ha-ahdędi- -ʔ FACT MASC.AGT set.out PFV assertion he set out (colon) ‘He set out,’

Discourse effects of polysynthesis

b. hǫgwéh, man ‘a man,’ When, years ago, I tried to analyze examples like this in terms of given and new information, I thought of interpreting the masculine singular element in a word like wá:hdę:diʔ ‘he set out’ as expressing given information, as if it corresponded to the English pronoun ‘he’. However, if a given idea is one the speaker assumes is already in the active consciousness of the listener (Chafe 1994: 71–81), that could not be assumed of the idea of the man in (15a) because this was his first introduction into the discourse. In that sense the idea of the man was a new idea in (15a), even though there is no good way to translate wá:hdędiʔ except with the English pronoun ‘he’, which in English expresses a given idea. To that extent it is incorrect to say that the so-called pronominal prefix in wá:hdę:diʔ corresponds to the English pronoun ‘he’. I believe a better way to interpret this situation is implied by the understanding that the verb in (15a) conveyed the idea of a holistic event, including its participant, all of which was new information at this point. Separating the idea of the man from the event, as must be done in English with the separate word ‘he’, distorts what is happening in the Seneca, and leads to such pseudo-problems as wondering whether the ‘he’ is given or new. In other words, the given-new distinction is irrelevant to a participant in a holistic event. It does apply to the idea of the event as a whole, which indeed was a new idea, but it does not apply separately to a participant within that event. A second problem, not unrelated to the first, is the question of whether, by the time we come to (15b), the man is or is not identifiable. Is it, in other words, ‘a man’ or ‘the man’. The fact that this man was already introduced as part of the verb in (15a) suggests that he was subsequently identifiable. In fact, the particle neh at the end of (15a) often functions as a kind of definite article. English, on the other hand, forces us to treat the man as not identifiable at this point, as shown in the free translation ‘there was a man who set out’, not ‘the man’. The fact that the introduction of this person as part of the Seneca verb in (15a) made him identifiable in (15b) is another discourse effect that is impossible to reproduce in English. To summarize, I have tried to highlight some of the differences between Seneca and English discourse by pointing to difficulties I have had over the years in translating from Seneca into English. After a discussion of particles, I concentrated on the fact that Seneca packs more information into a verb than English does. The holistic nature of Seneca verbs, and particularly the fact that they always include information about the core participants in events and states, affects the strategy with which ideas are introduced. Seneca begins a new topic, after some orienting particles, with a newsworthy event or state. If the participant in that event or state is of trivial importance, no further characterization may be necessary, but for a more important participant a minimal characterization may be added, while under other

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circumstances a more elaborate characterization may be called for. I illustrated other circumstances under which participants are introduced before events. Finally, I mentioned questions raised by the Seneca way of locating new information and identifiability. A general lesson from all of this, as I suggested at the beginning, is that discourse is inextricable from morphology. My intent has been to illustrate various ways in which the quite different morphologies of English and Seneca affect their discourse patterns.

Abbreviations Abbreviations are as follows: AGT = agent, CISLOC = cislocative, DAT = dative, DIM = diminutive, HAB = habitual, MASC = masculine, NEUT = neuter, PAT = patient, PL = plural, PFV = perfective, PRED = predictive, REP = repetitive, STAT = stative, TRANSLOC = translocative. See Chafe (1996) for details of the morphology.

References Abbott, Clifford. 1981. “Here and there in Oneida.” International Journal of American Linguistics 47: 50–57. Bowerman, Melissa. 1996. “The origins of children’s spatial semantic categories: Cognitive versus linguistic determinants.” In John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chafe, Wallace. 1961. Seneca Thanksgiving Rituals. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 183. Washington: Government Printing Office. Chafe, Wallace. 1980. “Consequential verbs in the Northern Iroquoian languages and elsewhere.” In Katherine Klar, Margaret Langdon and Shirley Silver (eds.), American Indian and Indoeuropean Studies: Papers in honor of Madison S. Beeler, 43–49. The Hague: Mouton. Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chafe, Wallace. 1996. “Sketch of Seneca, an Iroquoian language.” In William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 17: Languages: 225–253. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols. 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Cuoq, Jean André. 1866. Etudes philologiques sur quelques langues sauvages de l’Amérique. Montréal: Dawson Brothers. Reprinted 1966 by Johnson Reprint Corporation. Mithun, Marianne. 1984. “The evolution of noun incorporation.” Language 60: 847–894.

CHAPTER 4

Prosodic schemas Evidence from Urdu and Pakistani English Rebecca L. Damron Oklahoma State University

Introduction Prosody has long been an area of study for linguists; however, the advent of audio technologies over the last 40 years has enabled us to examine prosody in much more detail, and over much larger pieces of discourse. This study examines a prosodic unit, the intonation unit, in the context of conversational discourse across two languages, Urdu and Pakistani English in order to discover the role of prosody in interactional language, a role which until now has not been clearly defined. The results of this study indicate that research in prosody can inform our knowledge of information structure in discourse as well as have implications for our knowledge of discourse processing.

Prosody The research in prosody has developed as the research in interactive language has developed. Early studies of prosody (e.g. Pike 1945) focused on trying to assign meaning to prosodic features in much the way phonemes and morphemes are assigned meaning. However, the view of the relationship between prosody and meaning has evolved over time. Studies of prosody and meaning moved on to points in which contextual factors were recognized as important. Crystal (1969) claimed that situational elements, such as kinesic activity and/or grammar and other situational factors, are intimately connected with pitch and tone, and called for a move away from describing and analyzing prosodic features as discrete units. Coulthard and Brazil (1982) introduce principles for analyzing paralinguistic phenomena in which the main role of prosody is to add interactional meaning to grammar and lexical items. They emphasize that we cannot derive meaning from prosodic cues without context and explicitly state that we cannot make one-to-one correspondences between meaning and prosodic features. Recent work in prosody has continued to expand on the ideas set up by Crystal (1969) and Coulthard and Brazil (1982) by taking into consideration such aspects of interaction as how prosody can signal speakers’ intentions in the discourse. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) indicate that speaker and hearer intentions are im-

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portant in deriving prosodic meaning. Intention of the speaker as well as attention are integral to intonation choices speakers make, and, as such, intonation contributes to the overall discourse structure. Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (1996) go further to explain that prosody plays an integral role in the inferencing processes that occur in interaction. Prosodic cues “stand in a reflexive relationship to language, cueing the context within which it is to be interpreted and at the same time constituting that context” (p. 21). Therefore, language and prosody work together to structure interactional discourse. Prosody is important for the basic organizational element of conversational discourse — turn-taking. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) state that turns are constructed of units (hereafter TCUs) which could be a sentence, a clause, a phrase or a lexical item. Conversational participants are able to project which unit-type, i.e. a sentence, a clause, a phrase etc., is under way and predict the next unit or the end of the turn. They demonstrate projectability by illustrating how one speaker will start a new turn without waiting for a unit completion by the first speaker: Desk: What is your last name Caller: Desk: What? Caller: Dinnis. (p. 702)

Loraine Dinnis

The speaker at the desk hasn’t even finished the utterance when the caller overlaps the desk. The caller has projected the lexical unit-type of the speaker at the desk, her last name, ‘Dinnis.’ A prosodic unit, the intonation unit, plays a crucial role in predicting TCUs. Ford and Thompson (1996) demonstrated this in examining the places where a potential change of speaker may take place, hypothesizing that “prosody, syntax and meaning all seem to be involved in projecting the end of a turn unit” (p. 139). They studied the extent to which a syntactic completion is a predictor of turn completion and found that syntactic completion was not a good predictor; rather, intonation units and pragmatic completion points were better predictors. In addition to the role of prosody in structuring the discourse in turn-taking, other work has been done in which claims are made about the nature of prosody as used by speakers and hearers. The question is whether prosodic features act as a set of culturally determined cues or whether prosody acts as a universal cognitive constraint for online processing. Gumperz (1982, 1996) proposes that prosody is a culturally determined phenomenon, while Chafe (1994) makes claims for a processing constraint. Gumperz, Kaltman, and O’Connor (1984) claim that prosody is a culturally determined phenomenon structured and conventionalized much the way formulaic talk is: All prosodic signaling is based on a universal and limited set of elements (e.g. raising or lowering of pitch, rhythm acceleration or deceleration). However, the ways in which these universal prosodic elements are used in relation to syntax and

Prosodic schemas semantics to signal focus, perspective emphasis, and other thematic information are conventionalized . . . Equally culturally specific and conventionalized are prosodic cues of thematic progression in less formulaic talk (p. 6).

According to Gumperz, interactional language is structured with contextualization cues, nonlinguistic verbal signs, which “invoke a frame of interpretation for the rest of the linguistic content of the utterance” (1996: 379). He goes further to say that contextualization cues play a crucial role in the inferencing done in interactive discourse, “Contextualization cues channel the inferential processes that make available for interpretation knowledge of social and physical worlds” (p. 383). The contextualization cues are part of a larger system of contextualization, which is culturally bound. On the other hand, Chafe (1994) claims a processing function for prosody. Chafe bases his approach in the notion of consciousness. Consciousness, according to Chafe, provides an interface between the individual and the environment, a place where remembrance, imagination and emotions reside, a “complex internal model of reality” (p. 27). While the human mind attempts to model a larger reality, the mind cannot keep all the pieces of the model active at once — only one piece of the model can be active at a time. The small segment we focus on takes the form of an ‘intonation unit’, a prosodic unit which contains a single coherent intonational contour. The intonation unit contains information, which is in different states of activation during the course of a conversation. Some information is active, which Chafe calls ‘given’ information, and some, newly activated from an inactive state, is called ‘new’ information. A third type of information is ‘accessible’ or ‘semiactive’, that peripheral information which provides context for active information. As the discourse proceeds, information comes into and out of our focus of consciousness. More specifically, Chafe claims, the focus of consciousness in the form of an intonation unit, can only contain one new piece of information at a time. He calls this claim the One New Idea Constraint and proposes it as a universal processing constraint (pp. 153, 159).

Prosody in Hindi–Urdu and South-Asian English To examine the form and function of prosody, two languages were chosen for this study: Urdu and Pakistani English. The linguistic situation in South Asia is quite complex and these two languages co-exist with other native languages as a result of the historical influence of British English. Individuals in India and Pakistan are often bilingual or trilingual and English is frequently one of the languages. Urdu and Pakistani English were chosen for this study because the languages are quite different morphosyntactically and yet are spoken by the same individuals; hence, the question arises whether the prosodic features of these bilingual speakers are similar in both languages. Prosodic studies of Hindi–Urdu (Gumperz 1958; Gupta 1987; Bansal 1981; Elizarenkova 1988; Ramyaceva 1988; Pandey 1989; Rahman 1991) have focused

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mainly on word stress, but even in this regard there is no standard approach among researchers to assigning stress. On one hand, Kachru (1990) explains that syllables are classified according to weight: light medium, heavy. The stress seems to be put on the heavier syllable. However, there are doubts about whether Hindi–Urdu actually has stress. Cruttenden (1986) classifies Hindi as a syllable-timed language, that is, an equal amount of time is taken over each syllable in contrast to a stress-timed language such as Western English which takes “an equal amount of time from one stressed syllable to the next” (p. 25). That stress in Hindi–Urdu is less strong than it is in English (Ohala 1977), is certainly the case confirmed in the results of the current study. Gumperz (1982, 1992, 1996) has studied Indian English prosody. In comparing and contrasting sentence level prosody Gumperz (1982) claims, in much the same way that Chafe (1994) has, that the basic information unit in Western English is the single clause (a subject noun phrase and predicate verb phrase) and that is reflected in the basic tone group. He compares how South Asian English prosody is expressed at the simple sentence level. I have organized his conclusions (1982: 120) in Table 1. Gumperz’ ‘tone group’ (mentioned in Table 1) is based on Halliday’s tone group (1967). The table indicates that Western English has more stress and relies more on stress for signaling information. Terminal pitch contours are also more distinctive in Western English than South Asian English, and the tone group rather than being unified is broken up into phrases rather than clauses (p. 121) In terms of information structure, Gumperz et al. (1984) state that South Asian English speakers present background information with “high pitch and rhythmic stress” and then “shift to lower-pitched, less emphatic speech” for the main point itTable 1. Prosody in South Asian and Western English Western English

South Asian English

The sentence will comprise one tone group.

The sentence will be spoken as a single whole (no pauses).

The tone group will have a smooth unified contour.

There will be no unified contour; rather there will be two or more subunits separated by fairly abrupt changes in pitch or loudness.

The tone group will have two or more most prominent syllables, corresponding to peaks of information, one of which will be the nucleus and carry the main accent.

There will be no clear prosodically marked nucleus.

The contour will end in a [distinct] fall or rise.

The pitch change on the final syllables will be narrower; frequently pitch will be held high and level.

Prosodic schemas

self where American speakers of English do the opposite; the main point is emphasized with stress while the background information is de-emphasized (p. 6). The result of these differences affects the Western English speaker’s perception of Indian English: Indian English can sound either full of stress and staccato, or droning and monotonous. This is because, on the one hand, Indian English speakers rarely reduce syllables and pronounce almost all consonants with a higher degree of articulation than native speakers, thus in one sense employing a great deal of stress; yet, on the other hand, no syllables are stressed significantly more than any others. (Gumperz 1982: 121)

Thus the Western speaker is faced with the difficulty of determining central information, which is presented with relatively low pitch and nuclear syllables because of the differences in stress. Shifts in pitch register by Indian English speakers signal points in information structure while in Western English the accent placement and tune are the signal for information structure. Although Gumperz’s work provides valuable information about characteristics of prosody in South Asian English, much of the analysis is done with sentences rather than larger discourse chunks. This study will look at the larger discourse picture to determine whether Gumperz’ claims for prosodic features of South Asian English hold for Pakistani English, but also to determine whether the signaling functions for information structure are also confirmed.

Purpose and goals of present study The work in prosody reviewed here indicates that prosody codes speakers’ intentions, helps hearers project the ends of turns, contextualizes the discourse and reflects our consciousness. However, work needs to be done to demonstrate specifically what prosody codes in interactional discourse. Gumperz summarizes the problem in identifying the role of prosody in interaction: While it is clear that contextualization cues cannot be assigned context-independent stable meanings, it is also true that contextualization cues cannot be dismissed as merely conveying transitory non-referential expressive, emotive or attitudinal effects as some sociolinguists’ as well as phonetician’s studies of decontextualized prosodic and paralinguistic signs seem to suggest (Gumperz 1996: 383).

The goal of the current study is to address this question of where on this continuum prosody fits. Work on prosody in interactional language has mainly focused on American and British English. Although the work that has been done has come a long way from treating prosodic cues as phonemes or morphemes by studying prosody in the context of turns and by making cognitive claims for prosody, even recent studies such as Ford and Thompson’s (1996) rely heavily on what happens between individual intonation units rather than looking for patterns beyond the intonation unit level.

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In addition, the question remains as to how prosody is used cognitively by conversational participants. Do the participants rely on formulaic or schematic structures which are culturally determined or do they rely on universal prosodic signals in the online processing of language in interaction? This study addresses these issues by determining the form and function of intonation units in Urdu and Pakistani English conversational discourse through analysis of the prosody as well as clause and information structure of the intonation units. The morphosyntax of these two languages is quite different, and yet they are both spoken in the same culture. When compared with the work done on American English prosody, the study of these two languages will help to answer the questions posed about the role of prosody in conversational discourse.

Method Seven Pakistanis studying in the U.S. participated in recording conversations for this study. Three Pakistanis participated in the Pakistani English conversation and four Pakistanis participated in the Urdu conversation. In addition, all had been in the U.S. for several years. All participants were bilingual in Urdu and English and some, whose first language was not Urdu, were trilingual. Table 2 shows the first languages of the participants in both the Pakistani English and Urdu conversations. Participants are identified by a capital letter, as they will be throughout the method, results and discussion sections of this study. Although the participants were not chosen for native language background, several native language backgrounds were represented here, which was desirable in order to show that native language did not have an effect on intonation in Urdu. My (RESEARCHER) contributions to the Pakistani English conversation were not analyzed since I am not a native Urdu speaker. Conversations were collected by recording gatherings of friends to get as natural conversation as possible. Excerpts from the first 17 minutes of each conversation were chosen for intonation unit analysis and transcribed using the DuBois et al. (1992) transcription system; although, because several features in Western English do not exist in Urdu or Pakistani English, not all features were used. Table 2. Language backgrounds of conversation participants Pakistani–English conversation

Urdu conversation

Participant

First language

Participant

First language

M S SH B

Punjabi Sindhi Urdu RESEARCHER

A R F L

Hindko Hindko Pushto Urdu

Prosodic schemas Table 3. Speaker turns of more than five intonation units long Conversation/speaker

No. of turns

PE S SH M

13 9 1

TOTAL

23

Urdu R L A F

8 3 4 13

TOTAL

28

From the two conversations, PE and Urdu, The clearest excerpts were chosen. These excerpts were ‘long’ speaker turns. First, I marked all turns containing at least five intonation units in the first 17 minutes of each conversation. Turns shorter than five units were excluded in order to get samples not completely obscured by overlap or backchanneling which often occur as a speaker is trying to establish a turn. Turns of five intonation units allow a clear speech sample. In addition, turns that were unclear due to overlap or other situational interference (e.g. background music) were omitted. Table 3 shows the number of long turns produced by each speaker and total number of turns for each conversation Having determined the number and distribution of turns across speakers, I then observed that there were what appeared to be long IUs, which occurred in turns. In order to determine the distribution and nature of these long IUs, I coded IUs, under Chafe’s (1994) system of substantive and regulatory IUS, as ‘substantive’, those which express substantive ideas, or ‘regulatory’, those such as discourse markers which regulate information or interaction, then counted words per substantive IU. Examples 1 and 2 illustrate regulatory IUs coded for the current study (1) PE-1 like-,/ (2) PE-3 . . . uh= Examples (3) and (4) are Substantive IUs: (3) PE-1 . . . and it’s named engineering science building,\ (4) PE-2 . . . their protocol was to speak English most of the time,\

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Rebecca L. Damron Table 4. Excerpt information Conversation and excerpt no.

Speaker

Topic of turn

Length of No. of 10 word turn (in IUs) or more IUs

PE 1

SH

14

1

2

SH

10

1

3

S

22

2

4

S

52

5

Urdu 1

A building at the University of Texas-Austin Speaking English in Karachi offices Difference between Indians and Pakistanis A group of people in Pakistan called Memons

R

2

2

F

3

A

4

L

Shalwar-Kamiz (traditional 29 dress of Pakistan) wearing in the U.S. Comparison between Punjabi 12 and Pathan culture Examples of use of the word 6 ‘tarbur’ (Pushto word) Report of an interview between 14 a reporter and a murderer

1 1 6

Substantive IU lengths ranged from one to 30 words in the PE turns and from one to 27 words in Urdu turns. To determine the nature and structure of the turns containing these ‘longer’ intonation units, I chose four turns from each conversation. The criteria were that the turns had to be long (at least five IUs long), relatively clear in audio quality, and contain at least one IU which was 10 words long. In addition, as many speakers as possible had to be represented. The turns, which I will call excerpts for the remaining discussion, are presented in Table 4 by speaker, topic, and length of turn. Excerpts will be identified in italics as PE for the Pakistani English excerpts and Urdu for the Urdu excerpts. These excerpts were analyzed to determine the form and function of intonations units in the conversational discourse of the speakers in this study.

Results The excerpts were analyzed to address the main research questions of this study: What are the form and the function of these long IUs? How do they function in the larger discourse? The answers to these questions will allow a discussion of the larger issues of cognitive vs. cultural constraints presented by Chafe and Gumperz respectively.

Prosodic schemas

The form of IUs was determined by examining the length of the IUs through analysis of mean number of words per IUs, number of clauses per IU, and the number of what I term ‘multi-clausal IUs within turns. In addition, prosodic features are examined as part of form of IUs. The analysis then turns to the function of the IUs, particularly the multi-clausal IUs in terms of the content of the multi-clausal IUs and the discourse function of the multi-clausal IUs — contrastive topicalization. The results of these analyses will help explain how prosody functions in the discourse of Urdu and Pakistani English speakers, and how IUs play a role in the processing of discourse.

Form of IUs Since the long IUs were of initial interest in this study, IUs in both conversations were examined for number of words per IU. Subsequently, IUs in the excerpts were examined for clause structure which would later assist in analysis of the function of the IUs. In addition, prosodic features were examined to determine whether the features of Urdu and Pakistani English IUs were similar to Chafe’s observations for American English and whether they confirmed Gumperz’ observations for South Asian English.

Words per intonation unit

Size of IU in terms of number of words per IU was important to the study. Determining words per IU made it possible to establish a baseline of mean words per IU for Urdu. This then will allow us to determine whether the PE and Urdu means were similar. In other words, are Pakistanis producing the same average number of words per IU in Pakistani English as they are for Urdu? Number of words per IU were counted and averaged for the PE and Urdu conversations. Mean words per IU were determined for total IUs in each 17 minute conversation (PE and Urdu). The mean number of words per substantive IU for Pakistani English for the 282 IUs in the segments analyzed was 5.9. For Urdu, the mean number of words for the 263 IUs was 6.32. As indicated in Chafe (1994), the mean length of unit for American English is 4.84 words per substantive IU. Thus, Pakistani English speakers in this set are producing an average of one word more per IU than American English speakers. Chafe states that there are fewer words per IU in languages which “pack more information into a word” (p. 65). Urdu is one such language which packs more information per word than English. In Urdu nouns mark gender and number, and verbs mark person, number and gender. However, the Urdu speakers are producing one and one-half more words per IU than the mean for American English and almost one-half word more than the Pakistani English speakers. Thus, Chafe’s claims do not hold for the two groups of speakers in this study, which suggests that further study needs to be done on other morphologically complex languages to determine whether a generalization can be made for morphological complexity and mean words per IU.

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Chafe (1994) comments that there is a narrow range in the number of words per intonation unit for a given language. However, this study indicates that the range for Pakistani English of 3.63 to 6.6 mean words per substantive intonation unit is broad. The focus of consciousness is expressed in more words in Pakistani English than American English. It would appear, then, from the results of this study that not only languages, but also varieties of languages, differ in the size of focus of consciousness (in terms of number of words per substantive IU). Therefore, factors other than morphosyntax must control number of words per IU. These results indicate there is something other than a processing bias at work here.

Clauses within and across IUs

In order to determine how morphosyntax was working in the IUs, clause structure of IUs was analyzed. Clauses were coded in intonation units. Clauses, in Chafe’s view, ‘assert the idea of an event or state’. In Chafe’s terminology pieces of information are ‘ideas’. The category ‘idea’ includes ‘events’, ‘states’ and ‘referents’. According to Chafe (1994) “A state involves a situation or property that exists for a certain period without significant change whereas an event typically involves a change during a perceptible interval of time” (p. 66). ‘Referents’ are typically people, objects or abstractions (p. 67). Table 5 shows the number of clauses and the types of clauses in relation to IUs. Three categories of clauses were analyzed: uni-clausal IUs, cross-IU clauses and multi-clausal IUs. The category ‘Multi’ contains the number of multi-clausal units, not the total number of clauses in multi-clausal IUs. However, the number of clauses contained in multi-clausal IUs is indicated in parentheses. One other structure classified under cross-IU clause occurred infrequently (five instances across excerpts). These were IUs which contained a full clause plus part of a cross-IU clause either preceding or following the clause. Example 5 from PE-4 illustrates this. (5) PE-4 50 you have uh 51 . . . /\kachiawari memons | there is a place in india called /\kachiawar\ In this case, the clause ‘you have kachiawari memons’ is spread over two IUs and ‘there is a place in India called kachiawar’ is included in the second IU. I have labeled the IUs which contained a single clause as uni-clausal IUs. This is to distinguish them from the multi-clausal IUs which I will be discussing later. A typical uni-clausal IU in the data is represented in example (6). (6) PE-1 . . . and it’s named engineering science building,\ This is a proposition which codes the event ‘named engineering science building’ There were also instances of clauses expressed across IUs which I will call ‘crossIU clauses’. These are marked with a bracket ] as in example (7) from PE-4.

Prosodic schemas Table 5. Clauses within and across IUs Excerpt

No. of clause

Uni

Cross-IU*

Multi

English 1 2 3 4

11 9 18 46

5 9 11 25

3 0 3 5

1 (3) 0 1 (4) 7 (16)

TOTAL

84

50

11

9 (23)

Urdu 1 2 3 4

40 9 5 25

14 6 2 3

4 1 0 0

7 (22) 1 (2) 1 (3) 9 (22)

TOTAL

79

25

5

18 (49)

*Cross-IU clauses attached to multi-clausal units were counted as part of the multi-clausal units.

(7) PE-4 10 . . . you have the 11 /\pathans,_ In this case, the clause is spread across two IUs. The constraints on the verb ‘require’ it to have an object following it — in this case, ‘pathans’ which is produced in a separate IU. While the cross-clausal IUs occurred in the sample, they are not the focus here. The clausal analysis revealed that there were IUs which contained more than one clause. Many of these were the ‘long’ IUs observed. These will be referred to as ‘multi-clausal’ IUs. As the prosodic structure of analysis central to this study, the multi-clausal IU was analyzed for form and function. First, to determine whether the multi-clausal IU was a frequently occurring phenomenon in the conversational discourse, I analyzed the frequency and distribution of multi-clausal IUs in the 17-minute segments of Urdu and PE. The distribution and frequency of these multi-clausal units was determined by counting the number of turns with five or more IUs which contained multi-clausal intonation units. Table 6 presents the number of turns, the number of multi-clausal units and the number of long turns which contained multiclausal units for each speaker. Table 6 demonstrates that multi-clausal IUs were present in the speech of all but one of the speakers in this sample. According to Chafe (1994), 60 percent of his American English sample consisted of single-clause intonation units. Since Chafe does not discuss intonation units which contain more than one clause, it is unclear whether these are present

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Rebecca L. Damron Table 6. Number of multi-clausal IUs within turns in conversations Conversation and speaker

Turns

Multi-clausal IUs

Turns containing multi-clausal IUs

PE S SH M

13 9 13

26 6 0

7 6 0

Urdu R L A F

8 3 4 14

23 14 2 27

6 3 2 12

in American English. In examining the total number of single-clause IUs relative to the total number of clauses in multi-clausal IUs, there is evidence that in Pakistani English and Urdu there are many intonation units which contain more than one clause. In the Pakistani English excerpts, 60 percent of the clauses belonged to singleclause intonation units while 27 percent belong to multi-clausal intonation units. While the majority of the clauses in this case were single-clause units, which supports Chafe’s claim, one-third of the clauses produced belong to a category for which Chafe has made no claim at all. The Urdu data shows even more startling results in which 62 percent of the clauses produced belong to multi-clausal units while 32 percent belong to singleclause intonation units. While Excerpt 4 in the Urdu excerpts may be problematic because the proportion of clauses contained in multi-clausal IUs is unusually high (22 of the 25 total clauses), the percentages are still high even if we take only Excerpts 1–3 into consideration. There, 41 percent of the clauses belong to singleclause IUs and 50 percent belong to multi-clausal IUs.

Prosody

Having established the clausal forms of the IUs, the prosodic features of IUs were analyzed. Analysis confirmed Gumperz’ description of prosody with little stress and level terminal pitch contours. In order to characterize IUs for Urdu and PE, I examined the types of prosodic features found internally and types of terminal pitch contour. Table 7 shows the frequency and distribution of these features. Of the 85 substantive IUs in PE, 30 contained some kind of internal prosodic feature. In some instances more than one internal prosodic feature per IU occurred. However, in most cases only one prosodic unit per IU occurred. This leaves many IUs without any internal prosodic contour. The most frequently occurring prosodic

Prosodic schemas Table 7. Prosodic features of IUs Feature

Internal feature

Terminal pitch contour

PE

Urdu

PE

Urdu

/ \ = _ /\ \/ trunc.

15 0 4 N/A 11 0 N/A

15 0 4 N/A 13 3 N/A

25 12 4 44 N/A N/A 7

12 14 4 28 N/A N/A 1

TOTAL

30

32

85

58

features were the rising pitch contour and the rise-fall pitch contour. No pattern of use for these was found. For example, although the rise-fall pitch contour always occurred on multi-syllabic words, not all multi-syllabic words were marked with a pitch contour. In addition, there were multi-syllabic words which were marked with a rising pitch contour, so there was not a one-to-one correspondence at the lexical level. This suggests that speakers may have been using the contours for discourse emphasis. Level pitch was the most frequently occurring terminal pitch contour. For PE, 52 percent of the IUs were level pitch contour and for Urdu 48 percent had level terminal pitch. Pauses also occurred at IU boundaries in conjunction with other features. The occurrence of pauses was similar to level pitch contour with 51 percent of substantive PE IU boundaries and 52 percent of substantive IU boundaries in Urdu marked with a pause. However, pauses were not limited to occurring with level pitch contour. They occurred with all types of terminal pitch contour features. In sum, PE and Urdu IUs are characterized with no regular nuclear accent, such as is a characteristic of American English. In addition, level pitch is common in PE and Urdu at the end of IUs. Pauses also played an important role in defining IU boundaries in this data set. The multi-clausal units either contained no prosodic features or contained some type of internal prosodic features. Both tended to have level terminal pitch contours. Table 8 illustrates the frequency and distribution of these two types of multi-clausal units. For this set of excerpts, there are relatively more multi-clausal IUs which have no prosodic features internally. The types of prosodic features expressed in multiclausal units were limited to one prosodic feature per multi-clausal IU with the exception of one multi-clausal unit in PE-4 which contained two. Two types of prosodic features were used: lengthening and pitch contours. Lengthening occurred on two of the six multi-clausal IUs in the PE excerpts while the remaining four were pitch contours. The Urdu excerpts displayed only pitch contours in the five multi-

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Rebecca L. Damron Table 8. Prosodic features in multi-clausal IUs Excerpt

Total M-C IUs

Internal Feature

None

PE 1 3 4

1 1 7

0 1 5

1 0 2

Urdu 1 2 3 4

7 1 1 9

1 1 1 2

6 0 0 7

TOTAL

27

11

16

clausal units which contained an internal prosodic feature. Multi-clausal IUs tend to have one or no internal prosodic features.

Function of multi-clausal IUs Analysis of the function of multi-clausal IUs in this study was important for determing the role of prosody and the role of IUs in the processing of the discourse for the speakers. Multi-clausal IUs in the PE and Urdu excepts by coding more than one new idea per IU as part of a contrastive topicalization schema.

New ideas in mult-clausal IUs

One of the goals of this study was to test whether Chafe’s One New Idea Constraint applies to Urdu and Pakistani English. In order to do this, given and new and accessible ideas were coded in intonation units. Clauses in multi-clausal IUs were analyzed for the three types of information as defined by Chafe (1994): given-already active at this point in the conversation new-newly activated in this point in the conversation semiactive-accessible information that has been activated from a previously semiactivated state (p. 72) These states were identified by determining whether a clause contained a topic entity (Chafe uses the term ‘referent’) event or state idea which was new to the discourse. Example 8 from PE-1, shows how given, semiactive and new ideas were determined in the multi-clausal IU-IU14. (8) PE-1 1 sh: I was speaking with my /friends,/ 2 like-,/ 3 . . . (1.1)3 4 days ago/

Prosodic schemas

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 → 14

. . . (.7)they’re at UTA,/ university Texas Austin,/ . . . (1.1)and he was telling me /that,/ they have this uh= . . . engineering building/ . . . and it’s named engineering science building,\ . . . so its ens building\ . . . andby /ens,/ \/they=,/ ..I mean there are so many foreign students in that engineering science building |that ens does not stand for engineering science no more | it stands for english not spoken building_

In analyzing IU14, ideas were identified (topic entities, states, events). Given ideas include the topic entities ‘engineering science building’ which was introduced in IU9 and ‘ens’ which was introduced in IU10. New ideas include the event idea ‘does not stand for engineering science no more’ and new topic entity ‘english not spoken building’. Semiactive is a difficult status to identify. For example, in this case, ‘foreign students’ may be considered new or it may be considered semiactive because ‘foreign investors’ was introduced into the conversation immediately preceding this turn, hence, activating ‘foreign’ because we can assume from our world knowledge that SH’s friends are students at the University of Texas-Austin. However, the assumption cannot necessarily be made that all of SH’s friends or, for that matter, this group of friends are ‘foreigners’. The research question investigated here is whether multi-clausal units violate Chafe’s One New Idea Constraint. As a consequence, results of this analysis will only report the number of new ideas in multi-clausal units. Table 9 shows the results of this analysis. Table 9. number of new ideas per IU Excerpt

Multi-Clausal IUs

New Ideas

PE 1 3 4

1 1 8

3 4 15

Urdu 1 2 3 4

4 1 1 1

12 2 3 5

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The multi-clausal units in this data set all contained more than one new idea. The frequent presence of more than one new idea per multi-clausal IU indicates that Chafe’s One New Idea Constraint does not seem to hold for either Pakistani English or Urdu — or at least for these speakers of Pakistani English and Urdu.

Contrastive topicalization schema

One of the goals of this study was to determine how prosody functions beyond the individual intonation unit. Analysis of the data showed that each excerpt in the study contained contrastive topicalization at the level of the turn. Stress and intonation in American English are often use to code contrast. Myhill (1992) describes contrastive topicalization as a pairing of a topic entity and a value (topic entity-value) which contrasts with another topic entity-value pair. In the discourse, the topic entity is high in activation because it is given information, but it is not the only activated entity. It shares the activation with another entity with which it is being contrasted. The following example demonstrates contrastive topicalization: I had fish and vegetables. The fish was good. The vegetables were terrible. (Myhill 1992: 25) The two topic entities are ‘fish’ and ‘vegetables’ and they are assigned the values ‘good’ and terrible’, so the fish-good pair contrasts with the vegetables-terrible pair. Very often in the discourse one of the topic entity-value pairs is left out, for example, ‘The vegetables were terrible’ might be omitted, leaving an implicit comparison (Myhill 1992). Each excerpt in the current study was observed to have a topic entity mentioned earlier in the discourse which contrasted with another topic entity — the topic entity of the topic entity+ focus of assertion structure. The value for that topic entity is then added with information which establishes the second topic entity2 (the topic entity of the topic entity+prosodic focus of assertion structure) as given information and then Value2 is expressed in a multiclausal IU. Figure 1 schematically represents how this is expressed in the text. The figure depicts the representation of time as it unfolds as would a transcript — from top to bottom.

Topic entity1-(te1) Value1 (V1) CONTEXT Topic entity2-(te2) Contrast- Value2 (V2) Figure 1. Contrastive topicalization

Prosodic schemas

Example (9), again from PE-1, an anecdote about a building at the University of Texas at Austin, exemplifies this schema. Arrows (→) are placed next to relevant IUs and the specific items discussed are in bold in the text. (9) PE-1 1 sh: I was speaking with my /friends,/ 2 like-,/ 3 . . . (1.1)3 4 days ago/ 4 . . . (.7)they’re at UTA,/ 5 university Texas Austin,/ 6 . . . (1.1)and he was telling me /that,/ 7 they have this uh= → 8 . . . engineering building/ → 9 . . . and it’s named engineering science building,\ 10 . . . so its ens building\ 11 . . . and→ 12 by /ens,/ 13 \/they=,/ → 14 . . I mean there are so many foreign students in that engineering science building |that ens does not stand for engineering science no more |it stands for english not spoken building The schema is set up in the following way in example (10) for PE-1. (10) Contrastive topicalization schema Topic entity1 engineering building Value1 named engineering science building Topic entity2 ens Value2 does not stand for engineering science building/stands for English not spoken building In this case the first topic entity is ‘engineering science building’ and ‘named’ is introduced as the first value in the upcoming contrast. Note that this is produced in a single-clause IU. Then ‘ens’ is topic entity2. IU14 then serves as the focus of assertion which expresses value2 : ‘does not stand for engineering science building/stands for english not spoken building.’ There may be some question as to analyzing ‘ens’ as topic2. However, I interpret SH’s ‘by ens’ to mean that he is already thinking of ‘ens’ in terms of ‘english not spoken building.’

Triggers for the contrastive topicalization schema

The excerpts contained elements which trigger the contrastive topicalization schema. Example (11) from PE-3 starts with a contrast between Pakistanis and Indians (and Bangladeshis).

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(11) PE-3 1 s: 2 3 4 5 6

/pakistanis I think uh=,_ . . . what /I have noticed there is that you know,_ the /way we dre=ss,/ . . . (.7)and the /way we are built,/ . . we are built a bit different than uh= from bangladeshis and uh=indians

In this segment, S actually sets up the contrast between Indians and Pakistanis for which he goes into more detail in following IUs. The contrastive topicalization schema was also introduced with a ‘contrast word’. Example 12 from PE-2 demonstrates this. (12) PE-2 1 sh: also the difference like /my office,/ SH expresses the word ‘difference’ in the first IU of his turn. A contrastive topicalization schema prototypically at the turn level is invoked at the beginning of the turn with an implicit or explicit trigger. This is followed by a topic value pair in which topics and the first value are expressed in shorter single clause and cross-IU clause IUs, while the second value is expressed in a multi-clausal IU. The following example shows the contrastive topicalization schema as it is used in Urdu. This turn is a continuation of the topic which has been focused around the Pushto word tarbur. The turn is introduced with a contrast, illustrated in 13 , which is co-constructed by two speakers ‘a’ and ‘f ’. (13) Context for Urdu 3 a: ko tarbur [kehte hain] cousin to tarbur say-IMP is-AUX They say ‘tarbur’ for cousin. f: [dushman] enemy Enemy ‘A’, trying to explain the meaning of tarbur, which, for cultural reasons, means both cousin and enemy, uses the English word ‘cousin’. ‘F’, overlapping with a, contrasts this word with the Urdu word for enemy dushman. ‘A’ then takes the turn to further explain the meaning of tarbur in example 14. (14) Urdu-3 1 a: tarbur ke matlab dushman hi hota he tarbur of meaning enemy EMPH be-IMP is ‘The meaning of tarbur is enemy.’ 2 patha-je pushto meen\ path- this pushto in ‘Patha-in Pushto’

Prosodic schemas

3 4 5 6

f:

. . . (1.5)to = ‘so’ /\kehte hain say-IMP is ‘They say’ jani koi=uh-/ dost ke saath rather some uh friend of with ‘Rather with some friend’ . . . ta-taluq achha na ho| to kehte hain| kiun tumhara/ tarbur he vo he ta-relationship good not be-SUBJ then say-IMP is why your tarbur is ‘If the relationship is not good, then they say why is he your tarbur?’ @@@[@@@@@@@]

As with the Pakistani English example the contrastive topicalization is set up in uni-clausal IUs while the main idea of the turn, expressed in the last IU, is a multiclausal IU.

Discussion Urdu was characterized earlier as having less stress than English. The results of this study confirm this. There was no regular nuclear accent in the Urdu IUs. The IUs were identified as having one, perhaps two prosodic features per IU. These prosodic features seemed to be either lengthening or pitch contours. The results for Pakistani English were the same as those for Urdu. For Pakistani English, some of the characteristics which Gumperz presents for South Asian English were confirmed here, some were not. Keep in mind that Gumperz’ auditory unit was the tone group, not the intonation unit. However, the intonation units did not seem to have a clearly marked nucleus and the most frequently occurring terminal pitch contour was level. These results from the current study confirmed Gumperz’ statements. It is difficult to draw any conclusions about Gumperz’ remaining two characterizations for South Asian English: ‘The sentence will be spoken as a unified whole’ and ‘There will be no unified contour’. As to the first statement, it is difficult to make an equation with the current study because clauses, rather than sentences, were the syntactic unit of study here. As to the second statement, it is unclear what a ‘unified contour’ is and this unified contour is applied to the tone group, so it is unclear whether a parallel could be drawn. It seems that Urdu and Pakistani English speakers do not rely on the same prosodic resources for their intonation units as American English speakers. Less stress within IUs and a smaller pitch range in terminal pitch contours may necessitate

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more reliance on pauses as an IU boundary marker. While this study does not confirm labels such as ‘stress-timed’ or ‘syllable-timed’, for Urdu and Pakistani English, this data shows that Urdu and Pakistani English speakers use stress less than American English speakers, therefore, they don’t use the same prosodic resources as do American English speakers; they chunk information in other ways such as expressing information in longer intonation units. Recognizing the connections between the resources used at the local level, such as specific prosodic features and how those features affect the global information structure is important. The results of this study would indicate that Gumperz’ (1982, 1984, 1992, 1996) claims for culturally conventionalized contextualization cues accurately represent the prosodic situation described here. However, the results of the study also indicate that intonation units tell something about on-line processing. Ericsson and Kintsch’s (1995) study of working memory in which they divide working memory into short-term and long-term working memory helps to explain the results of the current study in which they explain that information is stored in stable form in long-term working memory and retrieved by reliable cues in short-term working memory. Translated to the current study, a contrastive topicalization schema may be invoked by the mention of a contrast at the beginning of a turn, which means the listener will be able to predict when the constrast (or turn) has ended by the presence of a multi-clausal IU. So the prosodic schema is a culturally determined schema stored in long-term working memory and retrieved through cues from the short-term working memory when the prosodic schema is triggered.

References Bansal, R. K. 1981. “English and Hindi: A contrastive phonological study.” CIEFL Bulletin 17: 51–60. Chafe, W. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chafe W. 1996.“Beyond beads on a string and branches in a tree.” In A. E. Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, 49–65. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Coulthard, M. and Brazil, D. 1982. “The place of intonation in the description of interaction.” In D. Tannen (ed.), Analyzing Discourses: Text and talk. Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, 94–112. Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press. Couper-Kuhlen, E., and Selting, M. 1996. “Towards an interactional perspective on prosody and a prosodic perspective on interaction.” In E. Couper-Kuhlen and M. Selting (eds.), Prosody in conversation, 11–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cruttenden, A. 1986. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. 1969. Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, J., Cumming, C., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Paolino, D. 1992. Discourse Transcription. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics 4. Elizarenkova, T.Y. 1988. “Morphophonology of Hindi.” In M. S. Andronov, and B. P. Mallik (eds.) Linguistics: A soviet approach, 367–386. Calcutta: Indian Journal of Linguistics.

Prosodic schemas Ericsson, K. and Kintsch, W. 1995. “Long-term working memory.” Psychological Review 102: 211–245. Ford, C. E. and Thompson, S. A. 1996. “Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational and pragmatic resources for the management of turns.” In E. A. Schegloff, E. Ochs and S. A. Thompson (eds.), Interaction and Grammar, 134–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. 1958. “Phonological differences in three Hindi dialects.” Language 34: 212–224. Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. J. 1992. “Contextualization and understanding.” In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context, 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. J. 1996. “The linguistic and cultural relativity of conversational inference.” In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 374–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. J., Kaltman, H. and O’Connor, M. C. 1984. “Cohesion in spoken and written discourse: Ethnic style and the transition to literacy.” In D. Tannen (ed.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse, 3–19. Norwood, N. J.: Ablex Publishing Company. Gupta, A. 1987. “Hindi word stress and the obligatory-branching parameter.” Papers from the annual regional meeting of the Chicago Linguisitic Society, 134–148. Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. Intonation and Grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. Kachru, Y. 1990. Hindi–Urdu. In B. Comrie (ed.), The World’s Major Languages, 470–489. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Myhill, J. 1992. Typological Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Ohala, M. 1977. Stress in Hindi. In L. Hyman (ed.), Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics no. 4: Studies in stress and accent, 327–338. Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California Department of Linguistics. Pandey, P. K. 1989. “Word accentuation in Hindi.” Lingua 77: 37–73. Pierrehumbert, J. B. and Hirschberg, J. 1990. The meaning of intonation in the interpretation of discourse. In P. Cohen and J. Morgan (eds.), Intentions on Communication, 271–311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pike, K. 1945. The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Rahman, T. 1991. “Pakistani English: Some phonological and phonetic features.” World Englishes 10: 83–95. Ramyaceva, I. N. 1988. “Hindi word-prosody (an experimental research).” In M. S. Andronov, and B. P. Mallik (eds.), Linguistics: A soviet approach, 395–431. Calcutta: Indian Journal of Linguistics. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. and Jefferson, G. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.

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CHAPTER 5

Rhetorical relations in dialogue A contrastive study Maite Taboada Simon Fraser University

Rhetorical Relations The study described in this chapter is an analysis of rhetorical relations in a set of task-oriented dialogues, in English and in Spanish. For this purpose, I followed Rhetorical Structure Theory, henceforth RST. Rhetorical relations, under different names and with somewhat different characteristics, have been both theoretical constructs and tools in the work of many discourse analysts. This section introduces the notion of rhetorical relations which are also referred to as coherence, or discourse, relations and discusses my choice of RST for the analysis. As Knott and Sanders (1988: 135) point out, coherence relations seem to evolve out of a theory of discourse, and “the starting point for any theory of discourse is the oft-noted observation that what we call ‘a text’ is more than just a collection of random sentences.” “More than just a collection of random sentences” means that texts show some internal coherence, that there are some fixed methods for linking one portion of text to another: The idea is that a choice amongst a finite set of alternatives must be made when juxtaposing two portions of text, and hence that a finite set of coherence relations will be sufficient to enable an analysis of every coherent text. (Knott and Sanders 1998: 136).

Whether recognized by the interactants or only by the analyst,¹ coherence relations are, then, underlying relations among the propositions in a text. The assumption taken in studies of coherence relations is that those underlying relations can be classified into a limited number of types. Coherence relations reflect pragmatic ties, but also intentionality on the part of the writer. ‘Writer’ is the word here, rather than ‘speaker,’ because the application of such relations has focused primarily on written texts. This chapter pursues the study of spoken language through coherence relations. This work is part of a larger project that analyzes generic structure in task-oriented dialogue (Taboada 2001). I considered the dialogues in the study as instances of a speech genre (Bakhtin 1986), noting also that they proceed in a clear sequence of stages or phases. Indeed, according to Martin (1992), genres are purposeful, staged,

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goal-oriented activities in which speakers engage as members of a culture. The components of this analysis include: surface relations (Theme–Rheme progression), underlying relations (rhetorical relations) and cohesion, all three as related to the staging of the dialogues. In addition to the results described here, the RST analysis also contains a study of the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal particular relations. For the analysis of underlying relations I chose Rhetorical Structure Theory for different reasons. The most important one is that RST has been extensively tested and applied — although mosty to written texts. A secondary reason is that it provides definitions of all the relations to be considered, thus increasing the reliability of the analysis. The next sections describe the results of a cross-linguistic analysis of spoken language, in order to show the explanatory power of rhetorical relations. I only considered the initial set of relations provided by Mann and Thompson in the central description of the theory (1988). The extension, and sometimes reduction, of the number of useful rhetorical relations has been a very much debated question — see, e.g., Hovy and Maier (1992).² My intention is to show how a set of relations which could possibly be enhanced is still powerful for three different purposes: 1. Description of spoken dialogue. 2. Comparison between two languages. 3. Application to the description of a new language, Spanish. This study presents some significant innovations in the application of rhetorical relations to text analysis. First of all, the mode is spoken language. With some exceptions (e.g., Fawcett and Davies 1992; Redeker 2000), coherence relations, especially within the RST framework, have always been applied to written text. RST has not yet been effectively related to dialogue. It must be expanded beyond written monologue to dialogue and multilogue in order to encompass a fully representative range of the functions of language. This will perhaps be the most significant modification of its present form. (Mann et al. 1992: 68)

Fawcett and Davies (1992) propose RST analyses of conversations that cover intraturn relations, thus considering a turn as a monologue within a conversation. Daradoumis (1996) extends RST to relations across turns. He follows Berry’s (1981) and Martin’s (1992) exchange model and provides an extended version, Dialogic RST, with new relations to capture the exchange structure of conversation. Daradoumis’ work concentrates also on collaborative conversation, especially tutorial dialogues. Although I do consider relations across turns, my work differs from his in that I did not attempt a modification of the original theory. A second innovation in this work lies in the fact that this is a cross-linguistic study, for which there are a few precedents, among them the work of Rösner and Stede (1992). Finally, it is applied to Spanish, which has not been, to my knowledge, analyzed employing RST neither in the written nor in the spoken form.

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

Issues in an RST Analysis of Dialogue Whereas I will not endeavor to provide a full description of RST, I will, in this section, describe how the adaptation of the theory, from written to spoken text, proceeded. A full account, together with relation definitions and text examples, can be found in: Mann and Thompson (1983, 1987, 1988), Mann et al. (1992), Matthiessen and Thompson (1988), and Thompson and Mann (1987). An RST analysis of a text implies that the text in question is functionally and hierarchically organized. That dialogue, and especially task-oriented dialogue, features a functional component is an intuitively acceptable consideration. The hierarchical organization seems to be more difficult to discover in an ongoing effort of two participants who have not planned a particular conversation before, are not allowed to produce drafts and final versions, and do not know what the other speaker will say — not specifically, at least, although there is some predictability in a familiar genre or type of conversation. Considering functional and hierarchical organization, there are two different ways in which the analysis can proceed, according to two different points of view. The first point of view is that of the analyst, where the conversation is presented as a product of the interaction of the two speakers. In this view the conversation is an autonomous, independently-functioning piece of text. The analyst is an observer, maybe even a recipient of this final product. We impose a second layer on the dialogue, which results in a detachment from the context where it happened to the context of the analysis. If this detachment happens at the expense of the original context, how is it useful? Although away from its original context and in a different one, the analysis might provide insights into how the interactants construct a piece of text in a joint manner, taking into consideration what has happened so far in the dialogue and incorporating the other speaker’s contribution in order to modify or adjust their own. Mann and colleagues (Mann et al. 1992: 41) consider “some dialogues as structured collections of texts.” It is this structural relation that I will try to unveil here: how the dialogue as text is organized and what general characteristics we can find in a corpus of such texts. The second point of view from which we could look at these dialogues is that of the interactants. In this view, the conversation is a process to which both speakers contribute in their respective turns. Each turn would be an independently created text, a response to the overall context, but a text in its own right. This type of analysis will reveal how and when each turn is autonomous, and how speakers create minipieces of discourse with the goal of contributing to a dialogue. Another consideration is that RST is, in a sense, a theory of influence; it is very well suited to describe what the writer/speaker does to influence the reader/hearer. A look at the inventory of relations will suffice, especially the ones grouped under the presentational heading “those whose intended effect is to increase some incli-

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nation in the reader” (Mann and Thompson: 197).³ The relations can often be described “in terms of the purposes of the writer, the writer’s assumptions about the reader, and certain propositional patterns in the subject matter of the text.” (Mann et al. 1992: 44–45). I will show that in this corpus we can also identify purposes, not of the writer, but of the speaker, who makes decisions in presenting his or her material in a particular way to achieve an effect. The choice and the presentation might not be as elaborate as it is in written discourse, due to time constraints and the impossibility of revising the material. We can, nonetheless, notice options of organization on the part of the speaker. The turn-by-turn analysis considers each utterance as a text in itself that seeks some reaction — an immediate one, unlike in written discourse. This type of analysis ignores the undoubtedly important relations holding between turns, but approximates the original RST analyses in that it approaches text as the product of one mind that projects towards a recipient.

The study The corpus used is a total of 60 conversations between two speakers, 30 in English and 30 in Spanish. For each language, the conversations are broken down in ten female-female, ten male-male, and ten female-male dialogues. The dialogues are part of a larger corpus collected by the Interactive Systems Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University as part of JANUS, a speech-to-speech machine translation project.⁴ They were recorded by volunteers, who received a small compensation for their time. The participants were all native speakers of either English or Spanish who lived in Pittsburgh. After recording, the dialogues were transcribed with human and non-human noises and intonation, and divided into semantically independent units, or Semantic Dialogue Units (SDUs). Each SDU is separated by a Semantic End of Segment (SEOS) marker. SDUs are comparable to Chafe’s (1980) idea units, or to the turn-constructional units of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). The translation of Spanish examples provided throughout the chapter is a free translation, rendered one SDU at a time. The translations do not include intonation or non-linguistic sounds (i.e., sounds that are not words). For those, the reader is referred to the original Spanish text. A summary of the most common symbols in the examples contained in this chapter can be found in the Appendix. The conversations are labeled with the name of the speakers who took part in them, followed by an indicator that represents either their order, or the month when they were recorded. The speakers are identified with an M for male or an F for female, followed by their initials. Whenever I know the gender of the speaker, I will use the appropriate pronoun to refer to him or her. Tables 1 and 2 provide a summary of the length of the dialogues, in terms of turns, SDUs and words. In Table 1, the figures represent total counts for each language. In Table 2, the figures provided are the means computed for the 30 dialogues

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

for each language. We can see that the dialogues tend to contain approximately the same number of turns. However, the Spanish turns are longer in terms of both SDUs and words. As explained in the previous section, two different types of analyses were carried out. In this section I describe the results for each of them in both languages, listing the relations found and providing examples. Table 1. Counts in the corpus

Turns SDUs Words

English

Spanish

249 784 6,804

248 1,294 9,112

Table 2. Mean lengths of dialogues

Mean length — turns Mean length — SDUs Mean length — words

English

Spanish

8.30 26.13 225.93

8.27 43.10 302.43

Turn-by-turn analysis The turn-by-turn analysis showed a number of repeated patterns in turns sharing the same purpose, elements that were always present because they define the genre of task-oriented dialogue, or because they are characteristic of dialogue. Table 3 displays a list of the relations found in the corpus, for Spanish and English. The percentage column shows the percentage of a particular relation with respect to the total number of relations found in that language. The results for English and Spanish, in terms of relations and their distributions, are very similar. In both cases, Elaboration shows the highest frequency of occurrence, followed by Concession and Condition. Lower in the list the relations vary only minimally in percentage distribution. No statistical tests of comparison between languages were performed, given the wide variability of the data, and the presence of counts of zero for some of the relations. Comparisons, then, are tentative and based solely on the percentages with respect to the total for each language. The next section provides a detailed analysis of two conversations, where we will also see instances of the intra-turn relations. The remainder of this section will consider some specific problems encountered when analyzing the data. The problems in applying RST to these dialogues had to do with their very nature. In naturally oc-

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% English

Spanish

% Spanish

Antithesis Background Circumstance Concession Contrast Condition Elaboration Enablement Evaluation Evidence Interpretation Joint Justify Motivation Non-volitional cause Non-volitional result Otherwise Purpose Restatement Sequence Solutionhood Summary Volitional cause Volitional result

1 13 5 71 9 66 166 10 8 0 1 29 34 3 37 43 4 10 28 7 7 4 7 17

0.17 2.24 0.86 12.24 1.55 11.38 28.62 1.72 1.38 – 0.17 5 5.86 0.52 6.38 7.41 0.69 1.72 4.83 1.21 1.21 0.69 1.21 2.93

1 16 9 70 8 89 140 4 11 4 11 26 22 0 54 29 4 26 47 20 0 6 11 48

0.15 2.44 1.37 10.67 1.22 13.57 21.34 0.61 1.68 0.61 1.68 3.96 3.35 – 8.23 4.42 0.61 3.96 7.16 3.05 – 0.91 1.68 7.32

TOTAL

580

656

curring dialogue we find elements pertaining to the specific genre, such as greetings and goodbyes, and also different degrees of spontaneity in the language, such as the presence of self-talk versus the more planned turns in which a speaker’s utterance evolves in an easily definable pattern. Example (1) shows two different groups of spans within the same utterance. The first part is mainly interactional and not related to the task itself, but to the performance of the task (“well, totally just missed what you said, but if it’s a date, oh yeah, yeah”). The second part is related to the task, reflects a reaction to what the previous speaker said, and it consists of three text spans, the first two in an Elaboration relation, and the last one as the nucleus of a Concession relation, as illustrated in Figure 1. (The span numbers displayed in the figure are shown in between square brackets in the example.) In this sense, Redeker (2000) remarks that parenthetical expressions that do not constitute background information, especially in spoken language, are not satisfactorily explained in any theory of coherence relations.

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

(1) [FCAD_FJAB_12] fjab_12_02: #tap# well {comma} /h#/ /um/ totally just missed /begin_lg/ what you said {comma} /end_lg/ {seos} /h#/ but if it’s a date {comma} oh yeah {period} yeah {period} [1] I’m out of town then {period} {seos} [2] I’m out of town from Monday through Wednesday {period} {seos} /h#/ [3] but /um/ {comma} /h#/ /ls/ the next week I’m free {comma} /h#/ for the most of the time {period} /h#/ #key_click# /lg/ {seos}

Elaboration 1

2–3

2

3

Figure 1. Relations in Example (1)

Another problematic case is that of parallel relations between two turns of talk. In Example (2), the two underlined segments hold a relation to each other, but no relation to the rest of the turn itself. In those cases, I decided to divide the turn into two independent groups of relations. The connections will play a role in the analysis of the conversation as a whole, but not in the turn-by-turn analysis. (2) [FBNT_MJFG_1] fjab_12_04: /ls/ /h#/ well Mrs Daley {comma} /ls/ I {comma} happen to /eh/ be in a seminar until six o’clock {comma} on Friday {comma} so I really have a true excuse {period} {seos} /ls/ /h#/ but {comma} I like /um/ the Monday thing {comma} /h#/ two weeks from now {comma} the twenty sixth {comma} {seos} it’s a good time for me {period} /h#/ #key_click# {seos} fcad_12_05: #begin_electronic_hum# /ls/ /h#/ that’s #tap# Ms Daley to you {comma} {seos} and {comma} /ls/ /h#/ #paper_rustle# what time would you like to have it on the twenty sixth {comma} {seos} how ‘bout {comma} /ls/ /h#/ say {comma} /ls/ /h#/ that lunch thing again {comma} #paper_rustle# {seos} you can buy me lunch again at like {comma} twelve to two {quest} {seos} that sounds good {period} /ls/ #end_electronic_ hum# {seos} The next aspect — which is not only an aspect of conversation, but also of written texts — pertains to genre-related aspects of the dialogues. The purpose of some stretches of talk seems to be merely that of complying with the characteris-

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tics of dialogue in general, or task-oriented dialogue in particular. These particular stretches of talk correspond to the holistic structure of the text “deriving from the genre or variety of text” (Mann et al. 1992: 41). Turns in which only greetings or goodbyes are exchanged do not show any coherent organization in relational terms; they merely serve to establish or maintain the communication, and to ascribe the texts to a specific genre, which both speakers know and exploit. Example (3), in Spanish, shows the end of a conversation where speaker FJGC confirms the appointment, and speaker FKAS agrees and signals that the conversation is over. (3) [FJGC_FKAS_04] fjgc_04_04: *pause* #paper_touch# /h#/ /um/ el veintiséis no hay problema {period} {seos} /um/ nos podemos reunir de once a una de la tarde {period} {seos} /h#/ está bien {quest} /ls/ #key_click# {seos} ‘The twenty-sixth there is no problem {seos} we can meet from eleven to one in the afternoon {seos} is that good.’ fkas_04_05: /h#/ sí {seos} está bien {period} {seos} perfecto {period} {seos} hasta luego {period} #key_click# {seos} ‘Yes {seos} that’s good {seos} perfect {seos} see you later.’ I will finish this section on the peculiarities of a turn-by-turn RST analysis for conversation by pointing out that some of the problems already described in these examples of short turns were also present when analyzing the conversation as a unified, coherent whole. In the analysis of full conversations, also encountered were holistic elements, related to the dialogue as interaction, and thus not considered for the analysis. The same holds for instances of self-talk.

Conversation-as-a-Whole Analysis Analyzing the rhetorical relations in a whole conversation entails a certain detachment from the conversation as interaction, as process, towards conversation as finished product. This second type of analysis does not pay so much attention to the effects achieved on the hearer, but to the cohesiveness of the text as an entity, leaving aside the fact that there was a target hearer or reader for these texts. In this analysis the procedure was to scan the conversation for the main purpose of the interaction, and from that macro-relation to proceed to the analysis of the smaller segments. The span or spans that represented the main point in the interaction were usually the ones that contained the proposal for a meeting. Once the problem was expressed, the rest of the conversation dealt with its solution, that is, with finding an appropriate time for holding a meeting. This main point is the Comprehensive Locus of Effect, the “portion of the text that represents the essence of the text as a whole” (Mann et al. 1992: 61). Obviously, at the lower levels of analysis, the relations holding were the same as those found for the turn-by-turn analysis. At the higher level, however, there were

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

new relations between the turns uttered by the different speakers. That is to say, a speaker might create a relation that includes one or more spans previously uttered by the other speaker. Segmentation was not always based on turns (i.e., a segment of text did not always start and end with a turn), although the turn boundaries frequently showed a natural breaking point. The decisions taken in the analysis of turns and the analysis of the conversation as a whole influenced each other, because decisions previously taken for instance, for the internal structure of a turn biased the analyst’s decision when the conversation was considered as a whole. In order to avoid, or at least balance, this influence, out of the 30 conversations for each language, 15 were first analyzed as whole conversations, and then broken down in turns. Then the other 15 were analyzed in the reverse order. I present here one example of analysis of two full conversations, one for each language. Example (4) shows a complete sample English conversation, and its RST analysis is represented in Figure 2. The spans in the figures are represented in between square brackets in the conversations. The Comprehensive Locus of Effect in this dialogue is a relation of Solutionhood: speaker MAGH asks from speaker MTNZ whether he has free time on a particular date. The problem-posing span is the satellite to the rest of the spans, which provide the solution. The next higher-order division takes place at the moment where speaker MAGH evaluates the current proposal, repeatedly, in spans 14–16: “that’s [f(ine)], okay, that’ll work.” The conversation is divided in two clear sequences at that point, which I will describe now. The first stage of the conversation, spans 2–13, is organized in another Solutionhood relation, the satellite being a question by MTNZ on a meeting date, and the nucleus the reply to that question. The question itself is composed of a Concession relation with an embedded Cause, which could be paraphrased as “although I can’t on that date because of x reason, how about this other date?” There is also an Elaboration on the negative: “no, that’s not good for me” which softens the bluntness of a single “no.” (4) [MAGH_MTNZ_11] magh_11_01: [1] #key_click# /h#/ /h#/ okay {comma} would you have {comma} two hours {comma} on Thursday afternoon {comma} the third {comma} or Friday {comma} the fourth {period} /ls/ #key_click# {seos} mtnz_11_02: [2] /h#/ /ls/ /h#/ no {comma} [3] that’s not good {comma} {seos} [4] I’m actually on vacation {comma} Wednesday {comma} Thursday {comma} and Friday {period} {seos} / sniff/ [5] how about /uh/ {comma} this Tuesday {period} {seos} tomorrow {period} #key_click# #click# /h#/ /h#/ {seos} magh_11_03: [6] /h#/ no {comma} {seos} [7] /um/ that sounds like this week {comma} doesn’t work {period} {seos} [8] /h#/ next week {comma} the earliest I could do it {comma} would be again {comma} Thursday

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afternoon {comma} or {comma} anytime Friday {period} #key_click# #noise# {seos} mtnz_11_04: [9] /sniff/ okay {period} {seos} [10] yeah I can’t do it on {comma} Thursday {comma} {seos} [11] but Friday {comma} in the afternoon would be good {comma} {seos} [12] how about /uh/ {comma} one to three {quest} #key_click# #noise# {seos} magh_11_05: [13] /h#/ /ls/ that’s Friday {comma} June eleventh {comma} one {comma} to three {quest} {seos} [14] [15] okay {comma} [16] that’ll work {period} #paper_rustle# #key_click# #paper_ rustle# {seos} mtnz_11_06: [17] #key_click# great {period} {seos} [18] let’s meet then then {period} {seos} [19] #key_click# /ls/ /h#/ #paper_rustle# see you {period}#key_click# /h#/ /h#/ {seos} magh_11_07: [20] #key_click# okay {comma} [21] I guess we’re done {period} #click# #key_click# #headset# {seos} Spans 6–13, the nucleus of the reply in the Solutionhood relation, are again broken down into a Solutionhood relation. The satellite is composed of spans 6–8 with a similar structure to the one described above, a Concession and an Interpretation: the “no” of speaker MAGH means that the week under consideration is out of the question and, despite that unavailability (Concession), he is willing to propose another date. Speaker MTNZ uses the same structuring in his reply: a Concession plus a proposal, this time the definitive one. Speaker MAGH elaborates on that proposal in span 13, which is an example of a possible multiple analysis. It could be a Restatement of what has been previously said, or an Elaboration on the date. In this situation, it was decided to assign it to an Elaboration relation because of the addition of new information to the previous speaker’s utterance. We can see how spans 11–12 mention Friday one to three, and speaker MAGH repeats some of that information, but also elaborates on it, adding June the eleventh to the information describing the date. So far we have seen the description of the first stage of the conversation. The interaction changes its character once the date has been settled. From that point on spans 14 to 21 there are no more Concession or Solutionhood relations, but Evaluations, Restatements, and Elaborations. Spans 19 to 21 were excluded from the RST analysis because they were considered to be purely interactional, a result of the specific holistic and generic structure of this type of discourse, showing no internal RST structure. In this second part, spans 17 and 18 are the final ones, constituting an Evaluation (“great”) and a Restatement (“let’s meet then”). The previous three spans, 14–16, are simply Elaborations on the Evaluation relation that this second part of the conversation displays with relation to the problem-solving part. A comparison of the above analysis with Spanish is provided in Example (5),

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

a dialogue whose corresponding RST analysis is shown in Figure 3, and discussed below. (5) [FSMA_MENF_05] fsma_05_01: [1] /h#/ hola Edu {period} {seos} [2] mirá {comma} {seos} [3] /eh/ qué te parece si arreglamos /h#/ para /ls/ la semana que viene {comma} /eh/ bueno /eh/ reunirnos un par de horas {period} {seos} [4] /h#/ /eh/ yo tengo libre el /mm/ lunes veintiséis {comma} después de las doce del mediodía {period} {seos} #paper_rustle# /h#/ /ls/ [5] qué te parece {quest} {seos} Solutionhood

2–21

1

Evaluation 14–21

2–13

Restatement Evaluation

17

14–16

18 Elaboration

Evaluation

14

Solutionhood 2–5

6–13

Concession

2–4

Solutionhood

5

Non-volitional cause

2–3

4 Elaboration

2

15

3

6–8

9–13

Concession

Concession

6–7

8

9–10

11–13

Interpretation 6

7

Elaboration

11–12

Elaboration

13

Elaboration 11

12

Figure 2. Rhetorical relations in Example (4)

16

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menf_05_02: [6] /ls/ /h#/ no {period} {seos} [7] mirá {comma} {seos} [8] yo el lunes no puedo {period} {seos} [9] /eh/ el martes tampoco {comma} {seos} [10] /ls/ /h#/ el miércoles puedo a la tarde {comma} [11] /h#/ y el jueves a la mañana {period} {seos} [12] porqué no me decís qué te parece <en> /h#/ entonces miércoles a la tarde o jueves a la mañana {period} {seos} fsma_05_03: [13] /ls/ /h#/ mirá {period} {seos} [14] imposible porque el / ls/ /eh/ miércoles yo tengo de dos a cuatro y media una reunión {comma} {seos} [15] y el jueves a la mañana tengo una conferencia de nueve a doce {period} {seos} /h#/ [16] así que tendría /crky/ que ser recién {comma} /h#/ el miércoles de la semana de [yain (ya_en)] agosto {comma} {seos} el miércoles cuatro {period} {seos} [17] porque yo voy a estar afuera el treinta {comma} /h#/ hasta el tres {period} /h#/ {seos} [18] bueno {period} {seos} [19] recién sería el miércoles cuatro {comma} /h#/ después de la una del mediodía {comma} o a lo mejor antes de las once de la mañana {period} *pause* {seos} menf_05_04: [20] /ls/ /h#/ /eh/ mirá {period} {seos} [21] el miércoles cuatro {comma} por la tarde {comma} yo puedo {period} {seos} [22] así que {comma} si te parece {comma} [23] quedamos el miércoles cuatro {comma} de dos a cuatro de la tarde {period} /h#/ {seos} fsma_05_05: [24] /ls/ /h#/ bueno {comma} {seos} [25] dále {period} {seos} [26] entonces nos vemos el miércoles {comma} /h#/ /eh/ /mm/ entre las dos y las cuatro {period} {seos} [27] [tá (está)] bien {period} {seos} [28] /h#/ /ls/ chau {period} {seos} Translation: fsma_05_01: [1] hello Edu {seos} [2] look {seos} [3] what do you think if we settle for next week well to <see each other> meet for a couple of hours {seos} [4] I’m free on Monday the twenty-sixth after twelve noon {seos} [5] what do you think {seos} menf_05_02: [6] no {seos} [7] look {seos} [8] I can’t on Monday {seos} [9] on Tuesday either {seos} [10] on Wednesday I can in the afternoon [11] and on Thursday in the morning {seos} [12] why don’t you tell me what you think then Wednesday in the afternoon or Thursday in the morning {seos} fsma_05_03: [13] look {seos} [14] impossible because on Wednesday I have from two to four thirty a meeting {seos} [15] and on Thursday in the morning I have a talk from nine to twelve {seos} [16] so it would have to be then on Wednesday in the week of already August {seos} Wednesday the fourth {seos} [17] because I’m going to be out of town on the thirtieth until the third {seos} [18] well {seos} [19] then

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

it would be Wednesday the fourth after one in the afternoon or maybe before eleven in the morning {seos} menf_05_04: [20] look {seos} [21] on Wednesday the fourth in the afternoon I can {seos} [22] so if you want [23] we can meet on Wednesday the fourth from two to four in the afternoon {seos} fsma_05_05: [24] good {seos} [25] okay {seos} [26] then we meet on Wednesday between two and four {seos} [27] that’s good {seos} [28] bye {seos} The Spanish dialogue exemplified shares many of the structural characteristics we already observed in the English one. It is also built around a Solutionhood relation, with spans 1 to 5 as the satellite and the rest of the dialogue for nucleus. The problem statement includes a Condition relation: span number 5 is the satellite which literally means “what do you think?,” and which I interpreted to be a condition on the proposal presented by the current speaker. A paraphrase could be “I’d like to meet on this date, if you want to/are available.” Span 4 represents an Enablement, the available date to meet, for the proposal of meeting presented in span 3. Spans 1 and 2 were not considered for the RST analysis, because they are merely interactional. Our next focus of attention is the main body of the Solutionhood relation, the nucleus in spans 6–29. These are again divided into two main parts which stand in a Solutionhood relation to each other. Spans 6 to 12 are the satellite, presenting another question on when to meet, and spans 13 to 29 constitute the answer to that question. I will describe the relations within those two groups of spans separately. The satellite of the Solutionhood relation is one utterance of speaker MENF, where he presents the constraints on his calendar by means of a Concession relation. He is being collaborative and, as a consequence, although he expresses his unavailability on the date that speaker FSMA proposed, he contributes some other options. The satellite of the Concession relation, spans 6 to 9, consists of an Elaboration on the “no” in spans 8 and 9, which is presented as a joint relation, two nuclei expressing the two dates when he is not available. Span 7 is not considered for the RST analysis. The nucleus of this Concession is presented as a Volitional Result at the top level with another embedded Joint relation. This time the two Joint nuclei present the two free slots of the speaker. As a result of this availability, the speaker would like to know what his interlocutor thinks of those dates. The Volitional Result is marked by entonces (‘then’). Now we turn to explore the structure of the nucleus in the second Solutionhood relation, spans 13 to 29. The first relation we encounter is one of Volitional Result, used again to express the idea that the speaker would like to meet, once the calendars have been described. The nucleus in this relation includes spans 13 to 21 and extends across speakers’ turns, starting at FSMA’s turn (the third turn in the conversation) and continuing onto the fourth turn, that of speaker MENF. This stretch starts with the presentation of a problem: speaker FSMA cannot meet on either of the days proposed. There are two Non-volitional Causes that build the background

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for the unavailability. The Non-volitional Result of this is that they will have to start considering a week in August for their meeting. The satellite of this Volitional Result includes an Evaluation (satellite in span 21), a Restatement (satellite in span 19), and a Non-volitional Cause (satellite in span 17). The satellite in the Volitional Result relation — spans 22 to 24–is the acceptance and restatement of the proposed date. As we saw in the English conversation, this last part of the interaction displays a completely different structure, where no ConSolutionhood

6–29

1–5

Solutionhood

Condition

6–12

5

3–4

Enablement

Concession

4

3

13–29

6–9

10–12 Volitional result

Elaboration

12

10–11

7–9

6

Joint

Joint

10

9

8

11

Non-volitional result

22–24

13–21 Non-volitional result

Elaboration

16–21

13–15

22–25

26 Elaboration

n-v cause Evaluation

n-v cause

13

14

15

16–19

Elaboration

22–23

21

Condition

Restatement

16–18

19

22

23

Non-volitional cause

16

17

Figure 3. Rhetorical relations in Example (5)

24

25

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

cessions or relations of Cause are present, only Elaborations on and Evaluations of the date proposed. Table 4 shows the number and percentages found in the analysis of the conversations as whole texts. The most frequent relation is still Elaboration, but this time two other relations are salient in their increase: Evaluation and Solutionhood. There is also a slight increase in the Restatement relation. I proceed now to explain their occurrence and to provide some examples. In the Evaluation relation the effect achieved is that the reader/hearer recognizes that the situation presented in the satellite assesses the situation presented in the nucleus and recognizes the value that it assigns. In the corpus this is mostly an interturn relation because the evaluations refer to what the other speaker said previously, and rarely to what the speaker is currently saying. This relation is never signaled by a discourse marker in the corpus. Example (6) below shows the Evaluation relation in the second turn, that of speaker FACR, responding and evaluating the proposal put forth by speaker FACR. Table 4. Number and percentages of the analysis of whole conversations English

% English

Spanish

% Spanish

Antithesis Background Circumstance Concession Contrast Condition Elaboration Enablement Evaluation Evidence Interpretation Joint Justify Motivation Non-volitional cause Non-volitional result Otherwise Purpose Restatement Sequence Solutionhood Summary Volitional cause Volitional result

1 14 4 71 7 67 175 11 82 0 1 29 34 3 40 45 4 10 24 7 121 4 4 17

0.13 1.81 0.52 9.16 0.90 8.64 22.58 1.42 10.58 – 0.13 3.74 4.39 0.39 5.16 5.81 0.52 1.29 3.10 0.90 15.61 0.52 0.52 2.19

1 18 7 70 8 89 140 4 67 4 11 26 22 0 54 30 4 26 71 20 126 7 11 49

0.12 2.08 0.81 8.09 0.92 10.29 16.18 0.46 7.75 0.46 1.27 3.01 2.54 – 6.24 3.47 0.46 3.01 8.21 2.31 14.57 0.81 1.27 5.66

TOTAL

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(6) [FACR_FJYK_AU] fjyk_au_04: #key_click# /ls/ /h#/ #paper_rustle# /ls/ okay nine thirty in the morning {comma} /h#/ /ls/ /h#/ until {comma} eleven thirty {period} {seos} #paper_rustle# /h#/ /ls/ /h#/ and then perhaps we can #paper_ rustle# #noise# /um/ get some lunch #click# afterwards {period} {seos} #click# how ‘bout {comma} you come over to my office {period} and then {comma} /ls/ /h#/ #noise# perhaps #noise# we can go over to the #begin_noise# conference room that’s #end_noise# right next to my office {period} #paper_rustle# #key_click# #noise# #key_click# / h#/ {seos} facr_au_05: #key_click# /ls/ /h#/ that would be fine on August eighth at #paper_rustle# nine thirty {comma} {seos} /h#/ /um/ #paper_rustle# /ls/ I would love to get some lunch as well afterwards {comma} /noise/ /noise/ #click# #key_click# #microphone# {seos} The next predominantly inter-turn relation is Solutionhood. Mann and Thompson (1988: 272) define Solutionhood as a situation, expressed in the nucleus, which presents a solution to the problem stated in the satellite. The terms problem and solution are broad, and they cover questions, requests (including requests for information), expressions of needs, and conditions that carry negative values. I have considered the question-answer pairs to be in a Solutionhood relation. Question and answer here are understood, in most cases, as more than one clause, not in the strict sense of two turns containing one clause or sentence each. A problem might be expressed in a long stretch of talk with embedded relations within it, and the same applies for the solution. As with Evaluation, Solutionhood is not signaled through discourse markers, although the clearest marking is the presence of an interrogative clause in the satellite. The last relation that I will examine is Restatement. Although there are intra-turn Restatements, some of them refer to something mentioned in the previous turn. In English we find only four of these inter-turn Restatements. Unlike in English, in Spanish the number of inter-turn Restatements is very high in comparison to the intra-turn ones. In English the total number of Restatements went from 24 to 28, whereas in Spanish the number climbed from 47 to 71 with the addition of the interturn ones. The Spanish speakers repeat much more often the previous utterances, sometimes even repeating two or three times the same information at the end of a conversation, in a closure sequence of sorts. These repetitions are also marked: 21 out of the 71 relations are marked with entonces (‘then’). This is indeed one of the most significant differences found in the analysis of the English and Spanish data. In Example (7), we can see how FKAS’s turn is a Restatement of the previous speaker’s turn.

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

(7) [FYMM_FKAS_02] fymm_02_06: /h#/ {begin_english} |s|okay {end_english} {period} {seos} está bien el martes treinta {period} {seos} a partir de las tres de la tarde {comma} estoy yo desocupada también {period} *pause* #key_click# / h#/ {seos} ‘Okay {seos} it’s fine Tuesday the thirtieth {seos} from three on I am free too.’ fkas_02_07: /h#/ entonces <nos> nos reunimos a las tres {comma} hasta las cinco de la tarde {comma} martes {period} {seos} /h#/ hasta luego {period} #key_click# *pause* {seos} ‘Then we meet at three until five in the afternoon Tuesday {seos} see you.’ There are some other instances of inter-turn relations, such as Volitional or Nonvolitional Result, but above I have discussed the most relevant ones. We now turn to the occurrence of rhetorical relations in the different stages of the conversations.

Rhetorical Relations and Staging The dialogues included in this study, as instances of a particular genre, proceed in a series of clearly definable stages. I will briefly describe how the stages in the dialogues are represented by, and usually contain, specific relations. It is beyond this chapter to discuss genre theory, and how speakers and hearers may come to know that such a conversation should evolve in a scripted manner, but the conversations, invariably, evolved in an easily predictable sequence of steps. The first level of organization is that of a telephone conversation (Schegloff and Sacks 1973),⁵ also found in other instances of task-oriented dialogue (Maier 1996). There are, in the dialogues in the corpus, three clear stages: initialization, task-performance and closing. The first stage varies in length and content. It goes from a simple “hello,” or just a throat-clearing noise, to a lengthy exchange involving questions about the other person’s health, work, family, etc. I considered an initialization, or opening, to be any segment of talk from the beginning of the conversation until the need to establish a meeting is stated by one of the speakers. Here there is a remarkable language difference: the openings of Spanish conversations are, on average, 1.2 SDUs (Semantic Dialogue Units) long, whereas the openings of the English conversations are 0.6 SDUs long. For an example, let us look at (8). (8) [FBNT_MJFG_01] fbnt_1_01: #begin_electronic_hum# #click# /ls/ /oh/ {comma} would #microphone# you like to meet {comma} #noise# /uh/ {comma} /h#/ #key_click# for a two hour appointment {comma} #click# #squeak# *pause* on {comma} *pause* Monday {quest} at {comma} five #microphone# PM {comma} #key_click# #end_electronic_hum# {seos}

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This is a typical English example, where the first speaker starts with a simple “oh.” Other common words, or sounds, include “okay,” “let’s see,” and “um.” The next example is a typical Spanish initialization. Although not very long — the second speaker immediately asks about the reason of the “call” — the speakers greet each other, use their names, and ask about each other’s well-being. (9) [MBRP_MFJR_05] mbrp_05_01: /ls/ /h#/ {begin_english} |s|okay |s|Freddy {end_english} {period} {seos} /h#/ cómo estás {quest} /h#/ {seos} ‘Okay Freddy {seos} how are you.’ mfjr_05_02: bien {begin_english} |s|Brent {end_english} {comma} {seos} cómo estás tú {quest} {seos} para qué me has llamado {quest} {seos} ‘Brent {seos} how are you {seos} why did you call me.’ Most of the initializations do not even constitute a full span of text, making it difficult to relate them to any other span. When there are actual relations, those are of Solutionhood, as in Example (9) above, or of Elaboration — a sequence of expressions such as “oh”, “okay”, “well”, “let’s see.” Now we turn to the closing stage, where the speakers usually confirm the date agreed upon, say goodbye, and close the conversation. Closings were considered to begin at the point where one speaker’s proposal had been accepted by the other speaker. Again, in this stage, the English and the Spanish conversations differ in length and type of relations. Whereas the English are usually short (3.4 SDUs on average), the Spanish closings are longer (5.3 SDUs) and contain a higher number of Restatement and Summary relations, often marked by entonces. Example (9) is a typical Spanish closing. The actual closing begins with the entonces clause in FSNM’s turn. (9) [FFCS_FSNM_01] ffcs_01_09: *pause* /h#/ perfecto {period} {seos} porque no nos reunimos /ah/ de una a las tres {period} {seos} qué tal {quest} *pause* #key_click# /ls/ /h#/ {seos} ‘Perfect {seos} why don’t we meet at one /ah/ from one to three {seos} how’s that.’ fsnm_01_10: /ls/ *pause* será muy bueno esa hora {comma} {seos} entonces te veré allí {period} #noise# #key_click# /h#/ {seos} ‘It’ll be good at that time {seos} then I’ll see you there.’ ffcs_01_11: /ls/ bueno {period} {seos} está bien {period} {seos} te veo el martes a la una {period} {seos} hasta luego {period} *pause* #key_click# *pause* {seos} ‘Okay {seos} that’s good {seos} I’ll see you Tuesday at one {seos} see you.’

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

The task-performance stage itself is composed of different substages. The usual flow of the conversation is represented in Figure 4. There are some variations on this general scheme, but it applies to most conversations, equally in English and in Spanish. An exemplification can be found in Example (4), which was discussed above. The typical realization of the flow in (4) is the sequence of Non-volitional Causes or Results providing reasons for the rejection of the proposal. In the sequence ReasonRejection, the typical relation is one of Non-volitional Result (“I have another meeting at that time, so I can’t meet”). In the sequence Rejection-Reason, the relation is usually one of Non-volitional Cause (“I can’t meet on that date, because I already have another meeting”). Non-volitional relations are often used in this context, in order to avoid loss of face by the other speaker. On the other hand, when an Acceptance takes place, the relations are most frequently Volitional Cause and Result, depending on where the optional Reason is placed. The other two elements are New Proposal, usually a Result (Volitional or Nonvolitional) of the speaker’s agenda, followed by a Condition (“we can meet on this other date, if that’s okay with you”). Finally, the Details are commonly expressed through Elaboration relations. I have thus far concluded that both languages share similar characteristics in the structuring of the conversations in three stages. With the exception of longer initialA–Proposal

B–(Reason) Rejection (Reason/elaboration) New proposal

A–(Reason) Rejection (Reason/elaboration) New proposal

B–(Reason) Acceptance (Reason/elaboration/details) End of stage

A–(Reason) Acceptance (Reason/elaboration/details) End of stage

B–(Reason) Acceptance (Reason/elaboration/details) End of stage Figure 4. Flow of conversation in the task-performance stage

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izations in Spanish, the length and structure of these stages is also very similar. Furthermore, the types of rhetorical relations used by speakers are similar in similar environments. For instance, the rejection of a proposal will very likely be expressed as a Non-volitional Cause or Result in English and in Spanish. I would like now to raise an issue of generality. One would be tempted to say at this point that the context of the situation and the characteristics of the task drive the realization of rhetorical relations to similar extents in the two languages. In other words, given a particular task that involves being cooperative, speakers of English and Spanish avail themselves of similar rhetorical resources. It is my belief that this is true to a certain extent. However, although these conversations are in two different languages, they do not occur in two different contexts of culture. The conversations in the corpus were recorded in the United States, and we need to ponder how much that might have influenced the structuring of the Spanish dialogues. In summary, the task being carried out and the need to be cooperative and polite are certainly all driving forces in the structuring of the rhetorical relations in both languages. The context of culture might be another factor, which cannot be teased apart in this particular study.

Concluding Remarks I have presented the results of a cross-linguistic analysis of spoken language, where I have closely examined the underlying relations between propositions in the discourse of two speakers who are trying to complete a task. Results show, first of all, that spoken language is suitable for a rhetorical structure analysis, and that patterns in the staging of the dialogues correlate with the type of rhetorical relations present at a particular stage. The cross-linguistic analysis showed no major difference between the English and the Spanish data in terms of staging or type of relations. The only difference was found in the length of the initialization and closing stages of the dialogues, which tend to be longer in terms of Semantic Dialogue Units (SDUs) in Spanish. I would like to conclude now with a remark related to the choice of rhetorical relations by speakers. I have already determined how the stage in the dialogue, and the subject matter (e.g., accepting or rejecting a date), in relation to politeness constraints, have an influence on the choice of rhetorical relation. There seems to be another factor at play, namely the preference of any given speaker for a particular relation. If a speaker uses, for instance, a Non-volitional Cause the first time he or she rejects the date, he or she is very likely to use the same relation to reject the next date. Moreover, this is true of less common relations, as well. One Spanish speaker had a preference for Justify relations, which he used three times in the conversation, the median use for all conversations being 1 and the mean 0.73. This phenomenon occurred across speakers as well; one speaker’s use of a particular relation resulted in a higher likelihood of the other speaker’s use of that same relation. In a

Rhetorical relations in dialogue

conversation from the English corpus, FHKR_FDMR_JA, the speakers used Justify four times, three times by speaker FHKR and once by speaker FDMR, after she had heard Justify used twice by the first speaker. The median use for Justify in English is 1.5, and the mean is 1.13. These speakers were, then, using the Justify relation much more often than average, and the only factor that seems to explain its frequency is the presence of a previous Justify relation. Weiner and Labov obtained comparable results in a study of agentless passives (1983). Given a number of factors that influenced the presence of a passive in discourse, the establishment of parallelism with a previous construction in which passive had been used was the highest determining factor. Of course, we should question why any relation is used the first time. This chapter has discussed the influence of subject matter, politeness constraints and dialogue stages on the choice of rhetorical relations.

Appendix: Transcription conventions The transcripts include a number of conventions introduced by the transcriber. These include human and non-human noises, as explained below. Category human noises non-human noises silences mispronunciations

Bracket /. . ./ slashes #. . .# hash marks/pound sign *. . .* asterisks [. . .] square brackets (around whole word) (. . .) parentheses (supply missing part of word or correct pronunciation of word, only inside square brackets) transcriber comments {. . .} curly braces accent |. . .| vertical bars/pipes false starts <. . .> angled brackets In addition, transcriber comments include intonation, marked with one of the following at the end of the corresponding section of speech. {period} Falling intonation {comma} Slightly rising intonation, continuation of idea, and not a question {quest} Marked rising intonation These comments do not reflect, nor are they influenced by, sentence structure. The speaker may have the intonation of a statement whether he or she is, in fact, asking a question. He or she may have the intonation of a period after a collection of words that do not, in any way, resemble a grammatically correct or complete sentence.

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Notes 1. On the psychological validity (or lack thereof) of coherence relations, see Knott and Sanders (1998) and Redeker (2000). 2. A related question, and criticism of RST, refers to the need of multi-level analysis, in order to include informational and intentional aspects of discourse (Moore and Pollack 1992; Redeker 2000). 3. Presentational relations are: Motivation, Antithesis, Background, Enablement, Evidence, Justify and Concession. 4. My thanks to the Interactive Systems Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University and its director, Alex Waibel, for permission to access the corpus used in this study. Sondra Ahlen also provided extra information on the data. 5. The speakers do not face each other, in order to avoid non-verbal communication.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berry, Margaret. 1981. “Towards layers of exchange structure for directive exchanges.” Network 2: 23–32. Chafe, Wallace. 1980. “The deployment of consciousness in the production of a narrative.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural and narrative aspects of narrative production, 9–50. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Daradoumis, Thanasis. 1996. “Towards a representation of the rhetorical structure of interrupted exchanges.” In Giovanni Adorni and Michael Zock (eds.), Trends in Natural Language Generation: An artificial intelligence perspective, 106–124. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Fawcett, Robin P. and B. L. Davies. 1992. “Monologue as a turn in dialogue: Towards an integration of exchange structure and rhetorical structure theory.” In Robert Dale, Eduard Hovy, Dietmar Rösner and Oliviero Stock (eds.), Aspects of Automated Language Generation, 151–166. Springer-Verlag: Berlin. Hovy, Eduard and Elisabeth Maier. 1992. Parsimonious of Profligate: How many and which discourse structure relations? Information Sciences Institute Technical Report. ISI/RR93–373. Knott, Alistair and Ted Sanders. 1998. “The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages.” Journal of Pragmatics 30(2): 135– 175. Maier, Elisabeth. 1996. “Context construction as subtask of dialogue processing: The verbmobil case.” In Proceedings of the Eleventh Twente Workshop on Language Technology, TWLT 11. Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1983. Rhetorical Propositions in Discourse. Information Sciences Institute Technical Report. ISI/RR-83–115. Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1987. Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization. Information Sciences Institute Technical Report. ISI/RS-87–190. Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. “Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization.” Text 8 (3): 243–281.

Rhetorical relations in dialogue Mann, William C., Christian Matthiessen and Sandra A. Thompson. 1992. “Rhetorical structure theory and text analysis.” In William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Discourse Description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text, 39–78. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Martin, James. 1992. English Text: System and structure. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Matthiessen, Christian and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. “The structure of discourse and ‘subordination’.” In John Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse, 275–329. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Moore, Joanna and Martha Pollack. 1992. “A problem for RST: The need for multi-level discourse analysis.” Computational Linguistics 18(4): 537–544. Redeker, Gisela. 2000. “Coherence and structure in text and discourse.” In William Black and Harry Bunt (eds.), Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue: Studies in computational pragmatics, 233–263. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rösner, Dietmar and Manfred Stede. 1992. “Customizing RST for the automatic production of technical manuals.” In Robert Dale, Eduard Hovy, Dietmar Rösner, and Oliviero Stock (eds.), Aspects of Automated Language Generation, 199–214. Springer-Verlag: Berlin. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, Emmanuel and Harvey Sacks. 1973. “Opening up closings.” Semiotica 8: 289–327. Taboada, Maite. 2001. Collaborating through Talk: The interactive construction of task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Thompson, Sandra A. and William C. Mann. 1987. “Rhetorical Structure Theory: A framework for the analysis of texts.” IPRA Papers in Pragmatics 1: 79–105. Weiner, Judith E. and William Labov. 1983. “Constraints on the agentless passive.” Journal of Linguistics 19: 29–58.

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CHAPTER 6

Interlanguage pragmatics Apology speech acts Euen Hyuk (Sarah) Jung Yonsei University

Introduction Over the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the pragmatic abilities of second language (L2) learners, and various speech acts have been studied by comparing native speaker’s performances with nonnative speakers’ performances (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Apologies are the second most widely studied speech acts after requests, from both the cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics perspectives. According to Fraser (1981: 260), apologies are defined as “the offender’s [apologizer’s] expressions of regret for the undesirable effect of the act upon the offended party [apologee].” Apologies are called for when social norms have been violated or when an expectation of the offended party has not been met (Fraser 1981). An apology speech act intends to restore harmony between apologizer and apologee; it is regarded as remedial work, which aims to change what might be looked upon as an offensive act into an acceptable one (Goffman 1971). Once the offense has been recognized by both parties, the offender must let the offended person know that he or she is sorry for the infraction. Therefore, the act is “highly hearer-supportive and often self-demeaning” (Edmondson and House 1981: 45). The conditions which call for apologies and the actual realizations of the apology speech acts are said to vary from culture to culture (Maeshiba et al. 1995). Speech communities have different views on what counts as an offensive occasion, the appropriate verbal remedies, and the value of contextual factors (e.g., social status and social distance of the participants, and severity of the infraction). These differences might cause miscommunication among people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Kim (1996: 16) provides a clear example of how people from different cultures perform apology speech acts by presenting a conversation between two roommates (i.e., a native Korean speaker (K) and a native American English speaker (E)), as in Example (1) below. (1) K: Could you please send this package for me? E: No problem. I have some errands to do myself at the post office today, anyway. K: I’m terribly sorry. I wouldn’t ask you this if I wasn’t so busy.

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In example (1), in response to E’s offer, K said “I’m terribly sorry” in order to express his sincere gratitude, which is acceptable in K’s first language (L1) social norms (i.e., the Korean social norm of using apology expressions when one feels greatly indebted toward another person who has done or will do some difficult job for him or her). In American culture, however, it would have been more appropriate if K had said, “Thank you very much.” This example illustrates the nonnative speaker’s failure to match a situation with an appropriate conversational routine in the target language context. Apology speech act studies have been carried out across various languages, and a majority of them have used written Discourse Completion Tasks or oral roleplays as data elicitation techniques (Barnlund and Yoshioko 1990; Bergman and Kasper 1993; Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Garcia 1989; House 1988 cited in Kasper 1992; Olshtain and Cohen 1989; Wolfson 1989). These studies have indicated that L2 learners’ performances are influenced by a number of factors, such as (a) learners’ lack of linguistic proficiency in L2, (b) transfer of their L1 linguistic knowledge, (c) transfer of their L1 pragmatic knowledge, and (d) their views on the value of contextual factors when apologizing, such as social status and social distance of the participants, and severity of the infraction. The learners’ lack of linguistic proficiency in L2 has been found to affect nonnative speakers’ apology performances (Cohen and Olshtain 1981). Data in Cohen and Olshtain’s study (1981) were gathered from three groups: native English speakers, native Hebrew speakers, and native Hebrew-speaking learners of English as a foreign language. They found that foreign language learners did not seem to know the appropriate L2 linguistic forms to convey their intentions and used general formulas instead, thus often saying too little in L2. In a later article, Olshtain and Cohen (1989) discussed these (1981) findings in detail, by providing specific instances of how Hebrew-speaking English learners’ apology performances deviated from those of native English speakers due to their inappropriate selection of linguistic expressions. For example, in the role-playing situation of wishing to offer repair to his boss for forgetting a meeting with him, a nonnative said “I think I can make another meeting with you.” The nonnative speaker’s original intention was to indicate his or her sincere willingness to meet with the boss another time, but it sounded presumptuous to the native English speaker since the boss (hearer) would be the one to decide on the next possible meeting. In the same situation, the nonnative wanted to express responsibility for forgetting the meeting and exclaimed, “We forgot the meeting here.” The nonnative’s attempt to acknowledge his responsibility could have failed because the choice of the pronoun “we” would suggest that the boss also forgot the meeting, inappropriately assigning partial responsibility to the boss. A direct linguistic transfer from L1 was also shown to cause pragmatic failure for nonnative speakers. For example, in Olshtain and Cohen’s study (1989), the nonnative speaker said “I really, very sorry. I just forgot. I fell asleep. Understand?” in the role-playing situation where the nonnative forgot a meeting with a friend. The nonnative’s use of the expression “Understand?” is a direct translation from Hebrew.

Interlanguage pragmatics

When it is used with a rising intonation in Hebrew, the expression would call for cooperation, in effect creating a feeling of solidarity between speaker and hearer. In English, this use of “Understand?” may bring the exact opposite effect, sounding impertinent to the native English speakers. In the case of bumping into a woman, a nonnative chose a wrong lexical item in his apology,“I’m sorry I interrupted you. Go on,” with the intention of apologizing for interfering with her progress. The nonnative might have selected the verb “interrupt” since the meaning of these two verbs “interfere” and “interrupt” is represented by the same verb in Hebrew (lehafrid). Not only does the L2 learners’ L1 linguistic knowledge influence L2 speech act behaviors, but also their L1 pragmatic knowledge plays a role in their L2 speech act performances. House (1988 cited in Kasper 1992) found that German learners of British English tended to transfer their L1-based preference for self-oriented strategies into L2 apology speech acts, while native British English speakers used different apology strategies, such as showing concern for the hearer and expressing self-deficiency and a lack of intent. Similarly, Garcia (1989) found that Venezuelan learners of English tended to transfer L1-based positive politeness strategies (i.e., being friendly, but not contrite, and expressing themselves with respect to solidarity and familiarity with the hearer) in apologizing to an American friend for not having attended his party, where negative politeness strategies (i.e., being deferential and self-effacing towards the hearer) were preferred by American English speakers. The Venezuelan learners’ L1-based strategy transfer into L2 apologies led to both disharmony and miscommunication between the hearer (host) and the apologizer. Furthermore, speakers’ value assessments of the contextual factors (e.g., severity of the infraction, and social status and social distance of participants) have been observed to influence their choice of apology strategies and to vary from culture to culture (Barnlund and Yoshioko 1990; Bergman and Kasper 1993; Wolfson 1989). For example, English speakers were found to intensify the apology choices according to the severity of infraction to a greater extent, compared to Thai learners of English (Bergman and Kasper 1993). With respect to value judgments on social status, Japanese offenders were observed to vary the apology forms in terms of hearer’s social status to a greater extent than their English-speaking counterparts (Barnlund and Yoshioko 1990). Similarities in value judgments between cultures as well as differences have been observed. In Bergman and Kasper’s study (1993), it was found for both Thai learners of English and native English speakers that the more socially close the interlocutor, the more likely the apologizer was to explicitly acknowledge responsibility for his or her infractions. Their findings seem to contrast with Wolfson’s bulge hypothesis (1989), in which responsibility is most explicitly assumed in medium social distance relationships, while little responsibility is assumed between participants at the two opposite points of the social distance continuum. Research has indicated that despite their high level of proficiency in grammar and vocabulary, L2 learners often fail to communicate effectively because they lack knowledge of appropriate L2 sociocultural rules, as well as appropriate L2 linguistic rules for conveying their intentions (Blum-Kulka 1982; Eisenstein and Bodman

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1984). The acquisition of native-like sociocultural and sociolinguistic proficiency has also been proven to be extremely difficult even for the advanced learners (BlumKulka and Olshtain 1984). Learning how to apologize appropriately within the target culture is important in order to become communicatively competent and to maintain harmonious human relationships. In comparison with other ESL learner groups, very little research has been done comparing Korean ESL learners with native English speakers in apology speech acts. This study aims to contribute to the growing research on apology speech act performances by: (a) examining how advanced Korean L2 learners of English apologize in comparison with the native English speakers with respect to apology strategies; and by (b) investigating the factors which contribute to differences and similarities observed in apology performances by these two participant groups.

The present study 1. Research Questions The present study aims to address the following research questions: Research question 1: how do the apology speech act performances of advanced Korean learners of English compare to those of native speakers of English, in terms of apology strategies? Research question 2: what are the factors that contribute to differences and similarities observed in apology performances by these two participant groups?

2. Apology strategies In this study, the following five apology strategies were considered. These strategies were based on the description of the apology speech-act set provided by Olshtain and Cohen (1983) and Trosborg (1987): – Expression of apology: use of an expression which contains a relevant performative verb. e.g. “I’m sorry”; “I apologize”; “Excuse me”; “Please, forgive me”; “Pardon me.” – Explanation: An explanation or an account of situations which caused the apologizer to commit the offense. – Acknowledgment of responsibility: a recognition by the apologizer of his or her fault in causing the offense. This semantic formula can be subcategorized into: Explicit acknowledgment e.g., “It completely slipped my mind.” Expression of lack of intent e.g., “I didn’t mean to.” Expression of self-deficiency e.g., “You know I am bad at remembering things.”

Interlanguage pragmatics

Expression of embarrassment e.g., “I feel so bad about it.” Explicit acceptance of the blame e.g., “It was my fault.” – Offer of repair: An offer made by an apologizer to provide payment for some kind of damage caused by his or her infraction, which can be specific and non-specific. Non-specific offer of repair e.g., “I’ll see what I can do.” Specific offer of repair e.g., “I will do extra work over the weekend.” – Promise of Non-recurrence: A commitment made by an apologizer not to have the offense happen again; e.g., “It won’t happen again.”

3. Methods Participants

The participants for this study were ten native speakers of English and ten Korean learners of English as a second language. There were five females and five males in each of the two groups; all were in their mid 20s to mid 30s and were studying at the graduate level at an American university at the time of the study. All the Korean speakers had Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores of 600 or above, a minimum of a one and a half year stay in the United States (one and a half to three years), and a minimum of eleven years of English study in Korea (eleven to twelve years).

Instrument

Oral role-plays were used to elicit the data. The role-play situations (i.e., apologizing to a friend for not showing up for her party and apologizing to a professor for not showing up for an appointment with her) were relevant to the study participants because these situations concerned student life at a university in general. In addition, in devising these apology role-play situations, various contextual factors were taken into account, which are observed to determine the speaker’s selection of particular apology strategies (Maeshiba et al. 1995). One of the contextual factors is the severity of infraction. In this particular role-play task, the apology situations are considered to have a relatively high severity of infraction, given the fact that an infraction of the same nature has occurred previously and that this was the second time it had happened (i.e., not showing up for a friend’s party for a second time; not showing up for an appointment with a professor for a second time). Contextual factors also include social status. The current role-play situations varied according to hearer’s social status (e.g., forgetting an appointment with a professor — higher social status than the apologizer; not showing up for a friend’s party — the same social status as the apologizer). Lastly, social distance is another contextual factor found to affect apology

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Euen Hyuk (Sarah) Jung Table 1. Contextual factors in apology situations Situations

Contextual factors

Situation 1: Not showing up for a friend’s party

Severity of Infraction: High Social Status: Apologizer = Hearer Social Distance: Close

Situation 2: Not showing up for an appointment with a professor

Severity of Infraction: High Social Status: Apologizer < Hearer Social Distance: Close

performances. This particular task specified that the apologizer and the hearer had relatively close social distance. In summary, different combinations of these contextual factors were devised in the study, as illustrated in Table 1. The apology situations were written in English and Korean in the English and Korean role-plays, respectively. The full text of the situations and instructions appears in the Appendix.

3.3. Procedures The general research design of this study involved two groups of participants (native English speakers and native Korean learners of English). The native English speaker group (n=10) performed one set of role-plays of English apologies. The Korean learners of English group (n=10) performed two sets of role-plays: the first set in their L2, English, and the second set in their L1, Korean. The apology speech act performances were then examined for differences and similarities in strategy use. Prior to engaging in each role-play, each of the participants from these two groups was first given a card describing the role-play situation. Then they were allowed to read the role-play situation. Participants were then individually asked to engage in oral role-plays in English with a native English-speaking interlocutor. After one week, only the Korean learners of English were asked to perform the same role-playing situations in Korean with a native Korean-speaking interlocutor for the purpose of establishing baseline data on Korean apology speech acts. The role-plays took place in a linguistics lab, which was a quiet place, with few interruptions during the performance. All responses were audio-taped and later transcribed.

3.4. Data analysis Three types of apologies (i.e., native English apologies, nonnative English apologies, and native Korean apologies) were analyzed with respect to the five apology strategies discussed previously (i.e., Expression of Apology, Explanation, Acknowledgment of Responsibility, Offer of repair, and Promise of Non-recurrence). Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in order to analyze the data. The frequency with which each of the 20 participants used any of the five apology strategies was calculated. The actual utterances of English and Korean speakers for

Interlanguage pragmatics

each type of apology strategies were compared qualitatively.

4. Findings and discussion The findings of the present study are discussed in terms of the five apology strategies below. The participants’ use of apology strategies is calculated according to situations, as presented below in Table 2.

4.1. Expression of apology Native English speakers and Korean learners of English used Expression of Apology strategies similarly in their L1 in both situations (SITU 1 and SITU 2: native English apologies 100% vs. native Korean apologies 100%). Consistent with the high use of this strategy in their L1, Korean learners of English also used it in L2. This use was similar to that of native English speakers (SITU 1 and SITU 2: nonnative English apologies 100%). However, differences were noted between the native and nonnative English apologies, in terms of the linguistic items chosen for expressing apologies. Although both native English speakers and Korean learners of English used English expressions, such as “I am very sorry,” “I’m really sorry,” “I’m so sorry,” and “I’m terribly sorry,” some of the Korean learners of English used expressions, such as “Can you forgive me?” and “Please, forgive me, please” in SITU 1. None of the native

Table 2. Percentage of participants’ use of apology strategies by situations Situations

Apology strategies

Native English speakers (n=10)

Korean learners of English (n=10)

Native English apologies

Native Korean apologies

Non-native English apologies

(SITU 1) Not showing up for a friend’s party

APOL EXPL RESP REPR NONR

100 100 80 80 10

100 100 60 80 20

100 100 30 30 0

(SITU 2) Not showing up for an appointment with a professor

APOL EXPL RESP REPR NONR

100 100 90 90 30

100 100 80 20 80

100 100 90 20 30

Note: SITU = Situation; APOL = Apology expression; EXPL = Explanation; RESP = Acknowledgment of responsibility; REPR = Offer of repair; NONR = Promise of non-recurrence

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English speakers used such expressions, and these utterances were not found in L1 apologies by the Korean learners of English, either. Such utterances used by the Korean learners of English (i.e.,“Can you forgive me?” and “Please, forgive me, please”) express an additional intensity, which should not have been necessary, considering the equal status of those involved in the apology speech act. The Korean learners of English seemed not to be able to use expressions appropriate to the L2 interactional context. This point is illustrated in Example (2). (2) Interaction between Native English Interlocutor (I) and Korean Learner of English (K) (SITU 1) I: Well, I was really hoping that you would come cause I told all of my friends you would be there, and we were looking forward to meeting you. K: Yeah, I know, I know, I’m terribly sorry. Um, you know, I’m sure I’m going to make up. But, you know, I’m going to make it next time. Please forgive me, please.

4.2. Explanation Native English speakers and Korean learners of English also used the Explanation strategy similarly in their L1 in both situations (SITU 1 and SITU 2: native English apologies 100% vs. native Korean apologies 100%). Again, consistent with their use of the Explanation strategy in L1, the Korean learners of English used this strategy in L2 as frequently as the native English speakers in both situations (SITU 1 and SITU 2: nonnative English apologies 100%). However, the Korean learners of English provided explanations, using significantly more words in L2 than the native English speakers in order to accomplish a similar pragmatic goal. Such a propensity is manifested only in their L2, not in L1. The Korean learners of English tended to elaborate the preconditions, the background, and the justifications for their infractions in a very verbose way, as if they felt that they could not communicate their intended meanings efficiently. This tendency of the Korean learners of English might be perceived by the hearer as both irrelevant and superfluous and might consequently lessen the force of the speech act. In Examples (3) and (4) below, both the native English speaker and the Korean learner of English failed to keep the appointment because they had forgotten to write it down. While the native English speaker succinctly provided the reason for her infraction, the Korean learner of English tended to provide excessive (superfluous) information. (3) Interaction between Native English Interlocutor (I) and Native English Speaker (E) (SITU 2) I: I think we said 10 o’clock. Remember? You said you couldn’t come to my office hours, so I had to arrange to come in this morning to talk with you about your paper. E: Oh, shoot. I totally forgot. I, I, absolutely forgot. I guess I must not have

Interlanguage pragmatics

put it in my calendar. Um, I know, I mean, I realize you made a special arrangement to be here because it’s outside your office hours and everything and . . . I feel really bad. I mean, I mean, I don’t know what I can say, all I can say is I’m sorry. (4) Interaction between Native English Interlocutor (I) and Korean Learners of English (K) (SITU 2) I: Yes, you said you wanted to go over the paper with me, and you made an appointment. So, I came in today. I came in just to meet with you this morning. K: Waa . . . How can I, how can I apologize to you? But the, I’m some sort of the absent-minded, so that’s why, I try to record all those schedules and all the appointments in my, in my some kind of notes. But, the, I forgot to record your appointment, so that’s why I just forgot. And then, what can I do? This is a very terrible thing, but I know that maybe if I had known that or if I had remembered that I had an appointment with you, I will have been in your office today. But, the, this is not something that I intended to do. So, please forgive me. Another example also shows verbosity on the part of the Korean learners of English. In example (5), it seemed that the Korean learner of English intended to simply say that he could not keep the appointment because he had forgotten. Instead, the following was observed. (5) Interaction between Native English Interlocutor (I) and Korean Learner of English (K) (SITU 2) I: Hi, I missed you today. Didn’t we have an appointment this morning? K: Oh, yeah, right. Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, presently, I forgot everything. I try to remember everything, but I, I forgot. Actually, frankly speaking, I forgot the meeting. I’m so sorry. I: Yeah, I wish you had called me or something. You know we made this appointment because . . . The verbosity manifested by the Korean advanced learners of English seems to be related to their lack of confidence and eagerness to ensure that their intended message has been conveyed to the hearer. As Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986: 177) have pointed out, “Verbosity is evident especially among advanced learners who possess the linguistic knowledge to support the intention of their speech acts but still feel uncertain of the effectiveness of their communicative interaction.” L2 learners’ level of proficiency seems to affect the way in which they attempt to approximate the target language norms (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1986). Learners with lower L2 proficiency tend to avoid verbosity due to their limited linguistic knowledge, while learners with higher L2 proficiency gain confidence as to their linguistic knowledge, but are not confident about the effectiveness of their speech acts, and thus, tend to be more verbose than the target language speakers.

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4.3. Acknowledgment of responsibility The native English speakers and the Korean learners of English showed a similar use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy in their L1 in SITU 1 (native English apologies 80% vs. native Korean apologies 60%). Despite the frequent use of this strategy in their L1 (60%), in which a variety of substrategies were employed, the Korean learners of English were less likely to acknowledge responsibility in L2 (nonnative English apologies 30%). Such a difference from the L2 norms might be due to the fact that while the Korean learners of English might be aware of the linguistic choices for expressing Acknowledgment of Responsibility, they might have been uncertain about the L2 sociolinguistic rules for speaking in apologies (i.e., Acknowledgment of Responsibility to a speaker of an equal social status), thus failing to use the strategy as frequently as the native English speakers. In SITU 2, the native English speakers and the Korean learners of English were similar in their use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy in L1 in SITU 1 (native English apologies 90% vs. native Korean apologies 80%). A wide variety of responsibility substrategies were also employed in both native English and Korean apologies. Likewise, the Korean learners of English used this strategy as frequently as the native English speakers in L2 (nonnative English apologies 90%). However, when using this strategy in L2, the Korean learners of English resorted to a limited variety of substrategies, such as Explicit Acknowledgment (e.g.,“I completely forgot about it.”) and Self-deficiency (e.g., “I am some sort of absent-minded”). The native English speakers, in contrast, used a variety of substrategies, including Explicit Acknowledgment (e.g.,“It completely slipped my mind”), Expression of Lack of Intent (e.g., “I didn’t mean to”), Expression of Self-deficiency (e.g., “I was such a jerk”), Expression of Embarrassment (e.g.,“I really feel bad about it”), and Explicit Acceptance of the Blame (e.g., “It was my fault”). It seems that these Korean learners of English had difficulty in readily producing a variety of substrategies in L2, despite the relative syntactic and/or semantic simplicity of these substrategies. Interestingly, both the native English speaker and the Korean learner of English groups acknowledged responsibility in apology speech acts in their L1, regardless of social status (SITU 1: native English apologies 80% vs. native Korean apologies 60%; SITU 2: native English apologies 90% vs. native Korean apologies 80%). However, when apologizing in L2, the Korean learners of English showed a different tendency. Value assessments of social status seemed to have affected their use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy; the Korean learners of English appeared to have different cultural views than native English speakers about apologizing to a speaker of the same social status, as opposed to apologizing to a speaker of a higher social status in English. In SITU 2, in which the Korean learners of English interacted with a speaker of a higher social status, they appeared to follow L2 English norms for using the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy (i.e., frequent use of the strategy, 80%), paralleling their propensity to use it in their L1 (90%). On the other hand, despite their frequent use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy in L1

Interlanguage pragmatics

in SITU 1 (60%), when they interacted with a speaker of the same social status in L2, they did not transfer their L1 strategy use to L2 apology performances (30%). It appears that the Korean learners of English felt that they did not need to acknowledge responsibility to an equal as much as when apologizing to a speaker of a higher social status in L2, thus acknowledging responsibility significantly less than their native English-speaking counterparts.

4.4 Offer of repair The native English speakers and the Korean learners of English showed a similar use of the Offer of Repair strategy in their L1 in SITU 1 (native English apologies 80% vs. native Korean apologies 80%). While the Korean learners of English frequently used the Offer of Repair strategy and provided a specific offer to remedy the situation in L1 (80%), they significantly underused this strategy in L2 (nonnative English apologies 30%). This may be due to the fact that: (a) the Korean learners of English might have lacked L2 linguistic knowledge to use this specific strategy; or that (b) despite being aware of the L2 forms for this strategy, they might have been unsure about the L2 sociolinguistic rules in the act of apologizing, and thus did not use this strategy as frequently as the native English speakers. In addition, there was a difference noted between native and nonnative English apologies concerning the degree of specificity of the offer of repair. The Korean learners of English provided a less specific offer of repair in SITU 1 (e.g., “How can I make up to you with this?;” “I’m sure I’m going to make up”). The native English speakers, on the other hand, provided a more specific offer of repair (e.g., “And, yeah, maybe we can go out, you know, go out to lunch or something sometime;” “Well, I mean, I can still meet them, and I mean, let’s make some plans!”). In SITU 2, notable differences were found between the native English speakers and the Korean learners of English in using the Offer of Repair strategy in their L1. While native English speakers frequently used the Offer of Repair strategy, the Korean learners of English used this strategy much less in their L1 (native English apologies 90% vs. native Korean apologies 20%). Likewise, the Korean learners of English did not offer repair in L2 as often as the native English speakers (nonnative English apologies 20%), possibly due to a transfer of L1 strategy use (20%). The Korean learners of English also provided less specific offers of repair in L2 (e.g., “How can I make it up to you?”), as compared to native English speakers (e.g., “I know that I’m going to have to fit my schedule into yours cause you said you waited, but I didn’t show up”; “I’ll come during those so that you don’t have to make a special trip”). In addition, in SITU 2 most native English speakers explicitly acknowledged that this was the second time that they had failed to keep the appointment with the professor and tried to assure her that they were going to keep the next one. Less than one third of the Korean learners of English gave such assurances in L2. Moreover, the native English speakers showed their concern for the hearer by suggesting first that they were going to come during her office hours so that she would not have to

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make a special trip. The Korean learners of English rarely made such an offer in L2. Unlike the native English speakers who were likely to request another possible meeting in order to remedy the situation (e.g., “Um, is there any way that we can meet another time?”; “Um so, hopefully, we can set up another appointment”), almost no Korean learners of English requested the next meeting in L2, which may be due to a transfer of their L1 pragmatic knowledge. Because of high and rather rigid respect for social rank and status in Korea (Hijirada and Sohn 1986; Scollon and Scollon 1991), it would be inappropriate for students to first request another future meeting with a professor in this context. Instead, they are merely supposed to wait for a suggestion from the professor. Such behaviors within L2 context might unintentionally be perceived by the American professor as unwillingness to restore the situation and lack of seriousness about one’s academic work (i.e., meeting a professor about one’s paper). Furthermore, Hijirada and Sohn (1986: 389) have indicated that: “Both Japanese and Korean, being extremely status-conscious, are eager to give and receive powerladen titles in daily interpersonal encounters.” This tendency was manifested in L2 apologies by the Korean learners of English, despite the role-play instruction which stated that the student called the professor by her first name. In Example (6), the Korean learner of English continuously used the address term “professor” throughout his interaction with the native English-speaking interlocutor (i.e., six times in nine turns). (6) Interaction between Native English Speaker and Korean Learner of English (SITU 2) I: Hi, I missed you today. Didn’t we have an appointment this morning? K: Oh, that’s right. Oh, that’s right, professor, um . . . I: You said you wanted to meet to talk about the paper, so I came this morning, but then you never showed up. K: Oh, oops. I’m really sorry about this, professor. Oh, I’m really, really sorry about this. I, I just forgot that I had an appointment with you. I’m really sorry about this, oh. I: I know it gets busy at this time of year. K: Oh, I wasn’t that busy, I just forgot. Oh, I’m so sorry, professor. I: Well, are you still interested in talking about the paper with me or . . . ? K: Yeah, definitely, but, I’m really sorry about this, professor. Am I bothering you a lot? I mean, because during this kind of busy time, I am making an appointment with you, so . . . I: Well, I mean, I wish you would come to the appointments when you make them. K: I will next time, I will! I’m sorry about the last time. I: Ok. Why don’t you try to come to my office hours this week then? K: Is it, is it? Ok, next time, I’ll be there. Then, I’ll talk about my paper. I: Ok.

Interlanguage pragmatics

K: I’m really sorry about this, professor. I’ll never do this again. I: Ok. I’ll probably see you during my office hours, then. K: Thank you very much, professor. I: Ok, bye. K: Ok, let’s do that. The frequent use of a social status title by Korean learners of English (i.e.,“professor,” not necessarily “Professor + last name”) can be regarded as transfer of linguistic as well as pragmatic knowledge by Korean learners of English from their L1. While in English the second person pronoun “you” can be used to refer to speakers regardless of a social status, the same equivalent Korean “you” cannot be used to address a speaker of a higher social status in Korean. A conversational participant role in Korean is encoded through other linguistic devices such as social status titles or kinship terms, and both of them are reflective of a strong emphasis on hierarchy and deference for age (Hijirada and Sohn 1986). For instance, younger brothers/sisters in Korea cannot address their elder brothers/sisters by their first names, but they should address their elders with special kinship terms (e.g., “hyeng” (elder brother of a man), “oppa” (elder brother of a woman), “nwuna” (elder sister of a woman), or “enni,” (elder sister of a woman)). Elder bothers/sisters, on the other hand, can call their younger brothers/sisters by their first names. Along the same line, it is quite common to observe students interacting with their teachers or college professors in class, using social status terms such as “teacher” or “professor.”

4.5 Promise of non-recurrence Both the native English speakers and the Korean learners of English rarely used the Promise of Non-recurrence strategy in their L1 in SITU 1 (native English apologies 10% vs. native Korean apologies 20%). Likewise, when apologizing in L2, none of the Korean learners of English used this strategy (nonnative English apologies 0%). In SITU 2, the native English speakers and the Korean learners of English showed a different use of this strategy in their L1 (native English apologies 30% vs. native Korean apologies 80%). When using L2 to apologize, the Korean learners of English successfully avoided negative transfer from L1 (80%) and used this strategy in much the same way as the native English speakers (nonnative English apologies 30%). However, these native and nonnative English apologies were different in terms of their linguistic choices for the Promise of Non-recurrence strategy. The native English speakers tended to use the Promise of Non-recurrence strategy within the immediate future, using expressions such as “I’ll make sure that I don’t miss next time,” “I promise that I won’t forget next time,” and “I’ll write down on my palm of my hand so that I can make sure I remember this time.” The Korean learners of English, on the other hand, were likely to use this strategy in a more absolute sense, such as “I’ll never do this again” and “I’ll never do that kind of things, again.”

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Conclusion The purpose of this study was to: (a) examine how advanced Korean learners of English perform L2 apology speech acts, as compared to native English speakers; and to (b) investigate the possible factors contributing to differences and similarities observed in apology performances by these two participant groups. It has shown that even advanced L2 learners did not necessarily possess adequate sociolinguistic or sociocultural awareness in order to successfully perform the speech act of apology in the target culture. Advanced L2 learners differed from target language speakers in terms of both lexico-grammatical and pragmatic appropriateness. The difference seemed to be due to a variety of factors, including L2 learners’ verbosity, transfer of their L1 linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, lack of awareness of appropriate L2 social norms, and lack of appropriate L2 linguistic forms to accomplish the communicative intentions. More specifically, the findings of the present study can be summarized in the following ways. First, similar to their use of the Apology Expression strategy in L1 (100%), Korean learners of English used this strategy as frequently as the native English speakers in L2 in both SITU 1 and SITU 2 (native English apologies 100% vs. nonnative English apologies 100%). However, the Korean learners of English differed from the native English speakers in their use of inappropriate L2 linguistic choices for apology expressions. Such a difference seemed to be due to these Korean learners’ difficulty using L2 linguistic items appropriate to the context. Second, consistent with their high use of the Explanation strategy in L1 (100%), Korean learners of English used this strategy in L2 in much the same way as the native English speakers did in both SITU 1 and SITU 2 (native English apologies 100% vs. nonnative English apologies 100%). However, the Korean learners of English were not able to use the explanation strategy succinctly and effectively in L2, but rather came across as being excessively verbose. Third, despite their frequent use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy in L1 (60%), the Korean learners of English significantly underused this strategy in L2, compared to native English speakers in SITU 1 (native English apologies 80% vs. nonnative English apologies 30%). This phenomenon seemed to be due to their uncertainty about the L2 sociolinguistic rules in apologizing to a speaker of the same social status. In SITU 2, paralleling their use of this strategy in L1 (80%), the Korean learners of English used the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy as much as the native English speakers (native English apologies 90% vs. nonnative English apologies 90%). However, while native English speakers used a variety of substrategies, Korean learners of English used only a limited set of substrategies in their L2, such as the Explicit Acknowledgment substrategy and the Self-deficiency substrategy. It seems that the Korean learners of English had difficulty in readily producing a variety of substrategies in L2. Fourth, notable differences were observed between native and nonnative apologies. In SITU 1, despite their frequent use of the Offer of Repair strategy in L1 (80%),

Interlanguage pragmatics

the Korean learners of English significantly underused this strategy in L2, as compared with the native English speakers (native English apologies 80% vs. nonnative English apologies 30%). This phenomenon may be due to the Korean learners’ lack of L2 linguistic knowledge concerning the use of this specific strategy, or due to their uncertainty about the L2 sociolinguistic rules in apology speech acts. In SITU 2, the Korean learners of English did not offer repair as much as the native English speakers (native English apologies 90% vs. nonnative English apologies 20%), which seems to be due to a transfer of their L1 strategy use (20%). The Korean learners of English also provided a less specific offer of repair than native English speakers in both situations. While the native English speakers suggested the next meeting in order to remedy the situation, almost no Korean learners of English did, which seems to be a transfer of their L1 pragmatic knowledge. Furthermore, transfer of L1 linguistic (and pragmatic) knowledge was observed among the Korean learners of English in their use of a social status title (i.e., “professor”) in interacting with the native English-speaking interlocutor. Finally, consistent with their low use of Promise of Non-recurrence strategy in L1 (20%), Korean learners of English rarely used this strategy in L2, which is also similar to the native English speakers’ apology performances in SITU 1 (native English apologies 10% vs. nonnative English apologies 0%). In SITU 2, the Korean learners of English successfully avoided negative transfer from L1 (80%) and used this strategy in L2 similar to native English speakers’ performances (native English apologies 30% vs. nonnative English apologies 30%). However, there was a difference noted between these native and nonnative English apologies in regard to the linguistic choices used. The native English speakers used the Promise of Non-recurrence strategy within the immediate future, while the Korean learners of English used this strategy in a more absolute sense. From a pedagogical perspective, cross-cultural speech act studies such as this are of value since the results can inform classroom practitioners as to how to sensitize L2 learners to cultural differences reflected in speech act performances between their native and target languages. Speech act studies can also provide information about situations in which particular apology strategies are regarded as appropriate by the target language speakers. Such research can help the learners become better users of the target language by making them aware of the overall patterns of behavior and choices for appropriate speech act realizations in the target culture. Furthermore, such studies are beneficial for ESL/EFL materials developers when choosing linguistic forms to be featured in their syllabus designs, by incorporating the patterns most commonly used by the target language speakers in specific situations. The detailed description of apologies realized by the native English speakers and the Korean learners of English in this study can allow us to identify areas for instruction for these particular Korean learners of English (i.e., incorporating research findings into classroom teaching). The advanced Korean learners of English would benefit from classroom instruction on some of the following aspects in L2 apologies: (a) use of appropriate linguistic choices for apology expressions; (b) ability

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to provide explanation in a succinct manner when apologizing; (c) use of the Acknowledgment of Responsibility strategy in apologizing to a speaker of the same social status as well as use of a variety of its substrategies; (d) use of expressions for showing concern for the hearer as an Offer of Repair strategy; (e) cultural tips about the power-laden titles in the native versus target cultures; and (f) general patterns of target language speakers’ use of the Promise of Non-recurrence strategy within the immediate future. Despite the benefits of the present study, it is limited in several ways. First, given the small sample size, caution should be exercised in generalizing these findings to a larger population, calling for replication using a larger data set. Second, although role-plays are useful in that they are efficient for eliciting desired data over a short period of time, they sometimes force unnatural behaviors from the study participants (e.g., people sometimes simply choose not to apologize in the real world). In addition, if the participants were not good actors, the results would be problematic since it is difficult to “distinguish the [participants’ L2] sociolinguistic proficiency from their situational adeptness” (i.e., abilities to “act out” a certain character in a given role-play situation, not necessarily demonstrating their L2 sociolinguistic proficiency) (Cohen and Olshtain 1994: 152). Lastly, there might have been a “response set” effect in the study since the participants were asked to react to apology situations, one immediately after another, causing the answer to one to affect the answer to another (Cohen and Olshtain 1981: 129). For future research, data should be collected on a larger scale from a variety of contexts, and they should be supplemented by gathering naturally occurring data in order to fully reflect real language use. With more extensive use of retrospective verbal reports based on video-taped interactions, one can probe further into the relationship between the learner’s actual production of speech acts and processes involved in the production of these speech act utterances (i.e., why the learner preferred to use a particular strategy in a certain context). In addition, it would be useful to compare how Korean learners of varying English proficiency levels perform apologies and how apology speech acts in L2 are acquired over time. Furthermore, studies of the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on apologies should be carried out. There is a clear need for further research in the area of apology speech acts.

References Barnlund, Dean. C. and Miho Yoshioka. 1990. “Apologies: Japanese and American styles.” International Journal of International Relations 14: 193–206. Bergman, Marc. L. and Gabriele Kasper. 1993. “Perception and performance in native and nonnative apology.” In Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka (eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics, 82–107. New York: Oxford University Press. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1982. “Learning how to say what you mean in a second language: A study of the speech act performance of learners of hebrew as a second language.” Applied Linguistics 3: 29–59.

Interlanguage pragmatics Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain. 1984. “Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP).” Applied Linguistics 5(3): 196– 213. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain. 1986. “Too many words: Length of utterances and pragmatic failure.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 8: 47–61. Cohen, Andrew. D. and Elite Olshtain. 1981. “Developing a measure of sociocultural competence: The case of apology.” Language Learning 31: 113–134. Cohen, Andrew. D. and Elite Olshtain. 1994.“Researching the production of second-language speech acts.” In E. Tarone, S. Gass, and Andrew D. Cohen (eds.), Research Methodology in Second Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 143–156. Edmondson, W. and House, J. 1981. Let’s talk and talk about it. München: Urban and Schwarzenberg. Eisenstein, M. and Jean W. Bodman. 1984. “ ‘I very appreciate’: Expression of gratitude by native and nonnative speakers of American English” Applied Linguistics 7(2): 167–185. Fraser, Bruce. 1981. “On apologizing.” In F. Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routine, 259–273. The Hague: Mouton. Garcia, Carmen. 1989. “Apologizing in English: Politeness strategies used by native and nonnative speakers.” Multilingua 8: 3–20. Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstructure of the public order. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hijirada, Kyoko and Ho-min Sohn. 1986.“Cross-cultural patterns of honorifics and sociolinguistic sensitivity to honorific variables: Evidence from English, Japanese, and Korean.” Papers in Linguistic 19: 365–401. Kasper, Gabriele. 1992. “Pragmatic transfer.” Second Language Research 8: 203–231. Kim, Ryonhee. 1996. “Teaching politeness in English speech acts.” English Teaching 51(4): 3– 34. Maeshiba, Naoko, NaokoYoshinaga, Gabriele Kasper, and Steven Ross. 1995. “Transfer and proficiency in interlanguage apologizing.” In Susan Gass and J. Neu (eds.), Speech Acts across Cultures, 155–187. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Olshtain, Elite and Andrew D. Cohen. 1983. “Apology: A speech-act set.” In Nessa Wolfson and Elliot Judd (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, 18–35, Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Olshtain, Elite and Andrew D. Cohen. 1989. “Speech act behavior across languages.” In H. W. Dechert and M. Raupach (eds.), Transfer in Production, 53–67. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Wong-Scollon. 1991. “Topic confusion in English-Asian discourse.” World Englishes 10: 113–125. Trosborg, Anna. 1987. “Apology strategies in natives/non-natives.” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 147–167. Wolfson, Nessa. 1989. Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL. New York: Newbury House.

Appendix: Apology situations The following situations are hypothetical situations that might have already happened to you or you might run into this kind of situations later in your life. Upon reading each situation, along with the interlocutor, improvise the conversation

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which might follow until the agreement is reached between you and the interlocutor. <SITU 1> Not showing up at a friend’s party You were invited to the party of one of your good female friends last night. You told her you were going to go, but you did not. She is quite upset because she told all of her friends about you, and they were expecting to see you. Besides, this is the second time that you did not show up at a party to which you told her that you were going. The last time, you called her at the last minute to let her know. This time, she calls you the next morning. Friend: Hey, what happened last night? <SITU 2> Forgetting a meeting with a professor You completely forgot about an appointment with a woman professor (in her mid 30’s) this morning, and you did not realize it until this afternoon. You were scheduled to meet her about your paper, and she made a special appointment for you because her office hours were not going to work for you this week. The problem is that this is the second time you have not shown up for her appointment this semester. Later, you run into her on campus. She seems to be rather upset. You took two courses with her last year, and you and she have got along relatively well. You call her by her first name, and you feel that you know her fairly well. Professor: Hi, I missed you today. Didn’t we have an appointment? Note: The same apology situations and instructions were provided in Korean in Korean apology role-play situations.

CHAPTER 7

Discourse marker use in native and non-native English speakers Hikyoung Lee Korea University

Introduction Studies of native English speakers have shown that the use of discourse markers is a pervasive feature of colloquial English (Jucker 1993; Miller and Weinert 1995; Schiffrin 1985; Watts 1989). Some studies claim that discourse markers are considered to be non-standard. They are also stereotyped in a negative light and are perceived to be a women’s language form (Romaine and Lange 1991: 256). The syntactic distribution of discourse markers and their multi-functions have been investigated in previous studies as well (Schiffrin 1982; Brinton 1996). Concerning the function of discourse markers, they are often regarded as having a verbal filler function which provides the speaker with linguistic planning time. In this sense, the discourse marker serves as a hesitation device. Discourse markers are found in languages such as English, Japanese, and German (Sankoff et al. 1997: 190). However, discourse markers are often considered to be somewhat ‘semantically bleached.’ This implies that the semantics of the word has been completely erased so that the word loses any meaning it originally had and does not take on another meaning. Therefore, it is often difficult to locate equivalent lexical items or translate discourse markers into another language (Brinton 1996: 34). Discourse markers have been called several different names which reflect the different ways they are used. Brinton (1996: 32) lists 34 items which she calls ‘pragmatic markers’ but these include non-lexical items such as ‘ah’ and ‘oh.’ In this study, the term discourse marker is adopted because it is neutral and does not imply a particular function as seen in the terms ‘hesitation’ or ‘filler.’ The working definition of a discourse marker utilized in this study will be as follows: (1)

Working definition Discourse markers are lexical items which are relatively syntactically independent, do not have a particular grammatical function, do not change the propositional meaning of the utterance, and are somewhat semantically bleached.

In addition, the function of discourse markers will be designated to be colloquial in this study. The colloquial function will imply that the discourse marker does

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not serve as a pause and is used to facilitate colloquial speech. The use of discourse markers is considered an indicator that the speakers are aware that discourse markers are a characteristic of colloquial speech and that they in fact help to facilitate the flow of speech. This corresponds to the colloquial function of discourse markers. Therefore, the use of discourse markers will be seen as a sign of fluency. There are no known studies conducted on English discourse marker use in nonnative speakers of a particular ethnic group. In this light, the present study is an exploratory investigation of the acquisition of English discourse markers by immigrants of a particular ethnicity. The study examines Korean Americans by analyzing the influence of sex and immigrant generation on discourse marker use. Sex is examined in order to determine if differences do exist and if there is justification to the claim that women use discourse markers more than men. In addition, crossgenerational differences according to age of arrival are examined to see whether native English speakers and non-native English speakers differ concerning use.

The present study The present study examines 12 ethnic Korean immigrants to the U.S. who are stratified by immigrant generation and sex. The category of generation is determined by the age and origin of birth of the speaker. A first-generation speaker must have been

Table 1. The speakers Speaker

Generation

Sex

Age*

Age of arrival

Nativeness

JY YS MK HA HB SW HJ EJ MW DJ CS MJ

1 1 1 1 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 2 2 2 2

m m f f m m f f m m f f

33 34 27 29 19 25 27 24 21 22 19 22

28 24 23 22 11 16 12 12 N/A N/A N/A N/A

NN NN NN NN NN NN NN NN N N N N

Note: m = male, f = female, N/A = non applicable, NN = non-native, N = native. Initialized pseudonyms have been used for the speakers *Indicates the age of the speakers at the time of the recordings as of 1997

Discourse marker use in English speakers

born in Korea and must have immigrated to the U.S. after the age of 18. A 1.5 generation speaker also must have been born in Korea but must have immigrated to the U.S. before the age of 18. A second-generation speaker must have been born in the U.S. of ethnic Korean parents. Generation is also an indicator of whether the speaker is a native or non-native English speaker. First and 1.5 generation speakers are non-native while second-generation speakers are native. Biological age was controlled in the study with the speakers falling within the 21–35 age range. The age of arrival of the speakers was not taken into consideration because all of the speakers arrived between 11– 16 years.1 In addition, other variables such as education and social class were not considered due to the fact that they were relatively constant across the speakers. Therefore the dependent variable in the study is the use of discourse markers and the independent variables are generation and sex. Table 1 shows the demographic breakdown of the speakers. The data corpus in the study consists of tokens of the presence of discourse markers in an average of 40 minutes of spontaneous speech for all of the speakers.2

Overall discourse marker use In the analysis of discourse markers, only those which occurred in the entire speech corpus were considered. The occurrences which were not included in the analysis were when the discourse marker was used for hesitation filler purposes. This was determined by analyzing the content of the utterance the discourse marker was in, whether there was a break in the flow of speech, and if the speed of speech slowed down as would be seen if the marker was a hesitation device. In addition, if the discourse marker showed signs of any particular grammatical function it was excluded. For example, in the particular marker of like, the use of like as an introduction to a verbal quotation was excluded because of its special function. In the study, a total of 11 different discourse markers which fit the criteria of the working definition was found. Discourse markers which occurred less than 5 times in the entire speech corpus were discarded due to their very low frequency rate and because they tended to be isolated in one or two particular speakers. The 11 discourse markers are you know, like, I mean, yeah, whatever, actually, something like that, so, right, I don’t know, and I guess. Table 2 shows the discourse markers analyzed across the 12 speakers in decreasing order of occurrence.3 As can be seen from the table, you know, like, and I mean have the highest rates of occurrence. These discourse markers comprise 90.13% of the total amount of discourse markers in the data. Individual preferences have been noted in Sankoff et al. (1997: 205) where the subjects in the study showed distinct preferences for certain discourse markers such as ‘tu sais.’ Here, individual preferences were examined to determine the extent of acquisition in the non-native English speakers and individual differences in the native English speakers. Table 3 shows the results of the analysis.

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Hikyoung Lee Table 2. Discourse marker use Discourse marker

Tokens

you know like I mean yeah whatever actually something like that so right I don’t know I guess

766 747 233 48 36 25 22 21 19 10 10

39.54 38.56 12.03 2.48 1.86 1.29 1.14 1.08 0.98 0.52 0.52

1,937

100.00

Total

Percentage

Like dominates with 6 speakers, while you know follows with 5 speakers. The one speaker who is JY, a first-generation male, did not use like or you know the most and instead showed a preference for I mean. The non-native speaker patterns appear to show the same tendencies as the native speaker patterns. This in turn may account for the acquisition of certain discourse markers in non-native speakers as well.

Table 3. Discourse marker preference Speaker

Generation

Sex

Preference

JY YS MK HA HB SW HJ EJ MW DJ CS MJ

1 1 1 1 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 2 2 2 2

m m f f m m f f m m f f

I mean you know you know like like like like you know like you know like you know

Discourse marker use in English speakers

Sociolinguistic variation Sex variation

It is believed that there is a certain stigma related to the use of discourse markers. Women are typically depicted as users of discourse markers. This in turn fuels a certain stereotype people have of discourse marker users as being female. In the present study of young Korean speakers, the difference between males and females was a negligible 0.26%: Sex

Percentage

Male Female

49.87 50.13

This result provides counter evidence to claims (Romaine and Lange 1991: 256, Brinton 1996: 34) that women use discourse markers more than men.

Generational variation

Cross-generational differences in the use of discourse makers was analyzed to determine patterns. The results are as follows: Generation

Percentage

1st generation 1.5 generation 2nd generation

16.12 45.27 38.61

An interesting finding was that the 1.5 generation speakers used discourse markers the most. A possible explanation would be that although they have fully acquired discourse maker use, they are overgeneralizing use. The 1.5 generation is under the most pressure to assimilate to linguistic and cultural norms and therefore may have pressure to appear competent in English by attempting to produce continuous flowing speech. On the other hand, the first generation showed a considerably low rate of use. This directly indicates that the first generation may not have acquired the pragmatics of discourse maker use. The results from the second generation indicate individual differences as well as a relatively low rate of use. The following are examples of discourse marker use in speakers from different generations. (7) Examples of discourse marker use across generations4 JY (male, 1st generation) I mean I mean the death reminded me the the I mean the life. What is the life? something like that yeah I I realized that the death is not so so distant one I mean it can it can come to me I mean anytime you know it can visit I mean anybody at any time so then I think that’s the first time to I mean to think about the death yeah.

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HJ (female, 1.5 generation) Like there’s always like people meeting up to have dinner with or whatever and like you know it’s like we prefer different things you know. She’d rather go out with a lot of people and I rather like sit down with one other person or two at the most and just have a nice quiet dinner and just like you know enjoy like chatting. MJ (female, 2nd generation) People were like, oooh, you know, wait, we don’t understand, you were born in the US? Like, you know, they couldn’t understand the concept. And I was like, yes, you know, biculturalism? you know? And so, and, you know, you know, people saying, you know, just, you know, you are Korean, but you can’t even speak Korean, and you know, what is that? As can be inferred from these examples, the two non-native speakers HJ and MJ appear to possess native-like English proficiency concerning the use of discourse markers. In fact, all of the speakers, regardless of whether they are a native or non-native English speaker, showed that they have acquired the use of discourse markers.

Interaction of sex and generation The interaction of sex and generation was analyzed to examine the relative influence of each factor in the speakers. Table 4 and Figure 1 show the results. As can be seen, as for overall use of discourse markers, 1.5 generation females used the most discourse markers while first-generation females used the least. Intra-generational differences showed that in the 1st and second generation, males used a considerable amount more of discourse markers than females. It was only in the 1.5 generation that females used more discourse makers than males. It is also somewhat surprising to note than within all of the generations, the difference between males and females exceed 30%. The interaction of sex and generation shows a very different perspective of use than what the individual factor analyses yielded. Table 4. Interaction of sex and generation Generation

Sex

Percentage

Overall

1st generation

male female

70.83 29.17

11.40 4.69

1.5 generation

male female

32.04 67.96

14.51 30.76

2nd generation

male female

62.03 37.97

23.95 14.69

Discourse marker use in English speakers 100 90 80

Percent

70

Female

60 50 40

Male

30 20 10 0

1

1.5 Generation Figure 1. Interaction of sex and generation

2

You know, like and I mean The three most frequently used discourse markers were you know, like, and I mean. A micro-analysis of these markers was conducted because of the dominance in use found in the speakers. Table 5 shows the results of the use of the markers in each Table 5. Use of the three markers Speaker

you know

like

I mean

TOTAL

JY(m,1) YS(m,1) MK(f,1) HA(f,1) HB(m,1.5) SW(m,1.5) HJ(f,1.5) EJ(f,1.5) MW(m,2) DJ(m,2) CS(f,2) MJ(f,2)

53 3 16 6 2 13 105 115 50 276 31 96

0 3 4 32 24 201 245 62 68 8 58 42

109 2 4 8 3 0 21 14 11 32 17 12

162 8 24 46 29 214 371 191 129 316 106 150

TOTAL

766

747

233

1,746

Percentage

43.87

42.78

13.35

100

Note: m = male, f = female, 1 = 1st generation, 1.5 = 1.5 generation, 2 = 2nd generation

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speaker. Of the three markers, you know and like show similar rates of use while I mean shows a relatively low rate. The data showed that most of the speakers use a combination of you know and like within the same utterance. This may provide an explanation for the relatively equal use of the two markers in speakers such as MW, CS, and MJ who are also all native English speakers.

Sex variation Results of the analysis of sex variation in the use of the three markers are shown in Table 6. The only discourse marker to show variation in sex was I mean. There was a difference of more than 30% between males and females. Otherwise, males and females showed similar degrees of use of the three markers. Table 6. Sex variation in the three markers Sex

you know

like

I mean

Male Female

51.82 48.18

40.69 59.31

67.38 32.62

Generational variation Cross-generational differences in the three discourse markers was analyzed. The results are shown in Table 7. Like showed the most variation across generations with you know and I mean following respectively. The 1.5 generation once more showed the largest envelope of variation with the first generation and second generation following respectively. Table 7. Cross-generational variation in the three markers Generation

you know

like

I mean

1st generation 1.5 generation 2nd generation

10.18 30.68 59.14

5.22 71.22 23.56

52.79 16.31 30.90

Interaction of sex and generation Table 8 and Figure 2 show the results from the analysis of the interaction between sex and generation in the use of the three markers. For the marker you know, second-generation males had the highest frequency with 1.5 generation males having the lowest. For the marker like, 1.5 generation females showed the highest frequency and first-generation males showed the lowest.

Discourse marker use in English speakers Table 8. Interaction of sex and generation in the three markers Generation

Sex

you know

like

I mean

1st generation

male female

7.31 2.87

0.40 4.81

47.64 5.15

1.5 generation

male female

1.96 28.72

30.12 41.09

1.28 15.02

2nd generation

male female

42.56 16.58

10.17 13.41

18.45 12.46

50 45

you know like I mean

40

Percent

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1st m.

1st f.

1.5 m.

1.5 f.

2 m.

2 m.

Speaker category Figure 2. Interaction of sex and generation

It should be noted that for like in all of the generations, females used it more then males. In the case of I mean, first-generation males used it the most while 1.5 generation males used it the least.

Conclusions The present study was an initial attempt to determine how the use of English discourse markers is acquired in native and non-native speakers of Korean ethnicity. Although the number of speakers in the study is too small to make any substantial claims, the study itself can be regarded as a step toward uncovering the nature of discourse marker acquisition. The results of the study reveal that although discourse

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makers are not taught through formal English instruction they are acquired not only by native speakers but non-native English speakers as well. In addition, all of the speakers show that they prefer to use a limited range of markers. It is clear that second language learners are aware of discourse markers and acquire patterns of use. This may imply that second language learners may be conscious that using discourse markers may render them as being one step closer to sounding like a native speaker when using colloquial speech. Also, discourse marker use does not impede but facilitates the flow of speech which is communicatively attractive to non-native speakers. This suggests that the function of discourse markers may adopt a colloquial aspect rather than a grammatical one. Further avenues of research on discourse marker use in non-native English speakers should examine for instance, first language transfer, the effects of critical age on acquisition, and why discourse marker use differs according to length of stay in the U.S.

Notes * I would like to thank Gillian Sankoff, William Labov, Megumi Kobayashi, Anita Henderson, and Christine Moisset for various comments and suggestions. I also thank the audience of ‘The 24th UWM Linguistics Symposium’ and the reviewers for their comments and helpful feedback. . Although length of time in the U.S. is an important variable, this variable was not considered to have a significant effect in this study because it was somewhat represented in the interaction of the age of arrival category and the biological age category. 2. The interviews were conducted by a native English speaker. The interview modules consisted of a series of topics which lead to the elicitation of oral narratives. The topics chosen for this particular study were those which the interviewee would be familiar with or have personal experience about. Talking about a familiar topic was considered important in order to discourage the use of discourse markers as hesitation fillers. Since in a interview where oral narratives are being elicited and the interviewer is assumed to have minimal participation in the interview, the amount of speech spoken and turns taken by each interviewer did not show significant differences. 3. The percentages in this table as well as subsequent tables was calculated by examining the occurrence of an item in terms of the total number of discourse markers extracted from the data. 4. As the examples are direct transcripts there may be various grammatical errors by the non-native speakers.

References Brinton, Laural J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 1993. “The discourse marker well: A relevance-theoretical account.” Journal of Pragmatics 19: 435–452.

Discourse marker use in English speakers Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Miller, Jim and Regina Weinert. 1995. “The function of LIKE in dialogue.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 365–393. Romaine, Suzanne and Deborah Lange. 1991. “The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress.” American Speech 66(3): 227– 279. Sankoff, Gillian, Pierrette Thibault, Naomi Nagy, Helene Blondeau, Marie-Odile Fonollosa, and Lucie Gagnon. 1997. “Variation in the use of discourse markers in a language contact situation.” Language Variation and Change 9(2): 191–218. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1982. Discourse Markers: Semantic resource for the construction of conversation. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1985. “Conversational coherence: The role of well.” Language 61(3): 640– 667. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schourup, Lawrence C. 1985. Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation. New York: Garland Publishing. Watts, Richard J. 1989. “Taking the pitcher to the ‘well’: Native speakers’ perception of their use of discourse markers in conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 13: 203–237.

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CHAPTER 8

Discourse markers across languages Evidence from English and French Suzanne Fleischman and Marina Yaguello University of California, Berkeley and Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot

Introduction The larger, theoretical issue we wish to explore in this chapter concerns the value and legitimacy of comparing discourse markers (DMs) across languages. Specifically, if different languages independently develop pragmatic markers¹ with the same function or, more strikingly, the same set of functions, then what are the implications of this situation for cross-language discourse analysis and/or the possibility of positing putative discourse universals? As a contribution to this question, we offer comparative data from English and French involving, on the one hand, the English DM like, whose frequency in the speech of ‘generation X’ and below has reached like staggering proportions,² and on the other, what appears to be a homologous marker now liberally punctuating the informal conversation of French teenagers, i.e. genre, as in (1)–(4), glossed here — in line with our hypothesis — by like : (1) Elle téléphone GENRE dix fois par jour ‘She calls LIKE ten times a day’ (2) Ce jean, il me va mieux, GENRE il me serre déjà moins ‘These jeans are better on me, they’re LIKE not as tight’ (3) Quand je lui ai dit que t’étais pas sûr de venir elle était vraiment pas contente, GENRE si vous jouez pas je chante pas ‘When I told her you weren’t sure you were coming [to her party] she was really upset, LIKE if you won’t [be there to] play [the piano], I won’t sing’ (4) Elle me dit: “Trois heures de cours dont une de dessin, ça fait deux ça”, GENRE le dessin ça compte pas. ‘She [the teacher] says to me: “Three hours of class including an hour of drawing, that makes two” . . . LIKE drawing doesn’t count!’ These examples illustrate several different pragmatic functions of genre and like, which will be sorted out below.

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Usage, history, and syntax: An overview Readers familiar with informal spoken English are surely aware that like is no longer sociolinguistically restricted to teenagers in either American or British usage. Adults use it also, to varying degrees, even if only in ‘transitional’ uses that are ambiguous between propositional and pragmatic meanings (see, e.g., (18) below). Genre too has already migrated up the age continuum; (3), for example, was produced by an educated, middle-class adult speaker. At the time of this writing, however, like is both more frequent and sociolinguistically more widespread than genre. It has also received considerably more attention in the linguistic literature, which may have to do in part with an attitude of linguistic purism for which the French are well known and which has not, shall we say, encouraged the study of language phenomena regarded as non-standard. For the record, genre is infrequent, though attested, in Canadian French; the Ottawa-Hull corpus (see Poplack 1989) suggests that francophone Canadians prefer comme (Poplack, p.c.), which may be a loan-translation of like, an independent development, or an independent development influenced by like. Like also has a longer documented history than genre: contrary to popular belief, like as a discourse marker is not a creation of the late 20th century but has a recorded history going back at least to the 19th century (Miller and Weinert 1998: 307, see also Schourup 1985; Romaine and Lange 1991). As for genre, its history as a pragmatic operator has yet to be been explored; the first — and only — linguistic lens focused on this marker to date is Yaguello (1998). For now, like appears to be syntactically more flexible than genre; it can be inserted virtually anywhere in an utterance,³ and this syntactic versatility may account in part for its exceedingly high frequency of occurrence. Genre is more restricted, perhaps because it is still essentially a noun (meaning ‘species, kind, sort, type, manner’), now used informally also as a preposition (un type GENRE Michael Jackson ‘a M. J. type of guy’). Resourceful language users, however, have enhanced the connective capacity of genre by adding to it the lubricating complementizer que, as in (5), thereby enabling it to function as a kind of generic subordinator:⁴ (5) a.

Il me dit: “Tu vas te planter au brevet,” GENRE QUE je vais me laisser impressioner. ‘He says to me: “You’re gonna screw up on the brevet exam.” LIKE I’m going to be upset by that!’ b. Tout le monde en parle à l’école, GENRE QUE c’est super important. ‘Everybody’s talking about it at school . . . LIKE it’s really important.’

It should be noted (since intonation is not reproduced here) that the statement introduced by genre que in (5a) is facetious: the speaker was not upset by her classmate’s remark. With appropriate intonation, statements with like express this same counterfactual modality (facetiousness, insincerity) in a manner similar to statements followed by colloquial Not! (cf. Haiman 1998: 53–54).

Discourse markers across languages

In the sections that follow, we describe the marker functions of like and genre, with a view toward illustrating the functional-semantic pathway we assume to have led from lexical/propositional meanings to pragmatic functions and from one pragmatic function to another. We then turn to some general considerations about discourse/pragmatic functions across languages and the issue of cross-language comparison of DMs.

Functions of like and genre A number of pragmatic functions have been identified in the literature on like, most notably as a FOCUS MARKER (Underhill 1988; Miller and Weinert 1998), an APPROXIMATOR or HEDGE (Schourup 1985; Andersen 1998; Jucker and Smith 1998), and a type of QUOTATIVE (Butters 1982; Schourup 1985; Tannen 1986, 1989; Blyth et al. 1990; Romaine and Lange 1991; Haiman 1993; Ferrara and Bell 1995; Fleischman 1995). Several of these investigators have attempted to incorporate multiple functions under a unitary pragmatic umbrella, revolving for the most part around the idea that like signals a speaker’s acknowledgment of a mismatch between what s/he is about to say and what s/he has in mind or feels ideally might or should be said in the circumstances in question. That is, in using like a speaker explicitly alerts listeners to the “loose fit” (Schourup) between overt expression and intended meaning, or what Andersen labels “loose talk”⁵ and Jucker and Smith a signal that a clause or expression “should not be taken too literally.” Purists, who decry the use of like, would presumably concur with this analysis, albeit negatively interpreted as signaling inarticulateness, inability to express oneself properly.

Focus The FOCUS interpretation was first put forth by Underhill in a 1988 article appropriately entitled “Like is, like, focus.” Like, in other words, marks as focal information whatever occurs to the right of it (bolded in the examples below), which can be a word (6), a phrase (7), a sentence constituent (8); or an entire utterance (9): (6) a.

Our library’s LIKE lame, . . . She’s not LIKE depressed or anything

(7) b. I’m only going to walk LIKE so far He hadn’t come in for LIKE a whole year (8) a. Her parents LIKE bought a farm in North Carolina b. Spain’s LIKE the perfect place for vacation (9) a.

I couldn’t come to class yesterday, LIKE I had this accident on the freeway b. A: You seem dissatisfied ? B: LIKE what do you mean? (Underhill, #58)

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The scope of like is often ambiguous, however, since in most cases the marker appears only on the left of a focused segment, leaving the right boundary open. In (10a) below it’s unclear whether the clause “I’ve just gotta do it” is or is not part of the focused information. For clarity, speakers will at times insert like before each segment of focused information, as in (10b), the expansion of (6b), and (10c): (10) a. My problem isn’t LIKE doing the work, I’ve just gotta do it. b. Our library’s like lame, LIKE there are no books there. c. . . . this is weird cos it’s LIKE happening LIKE really late. (cf. also (45) below and (62) from Finnish) Another solution to the problem of scope ambiguity, attested in certain varieties of British English, is to repeat like at the end of a focused segment, as in the examples in (11) from the British National Corpus: (11) a. It’s LIKE she’s really sad and quiet LIKE. b. Well she tried to act LIKE really friendly LIKE.⁶ c. . . . cos I, I really like her, I think she’s LIKE really funny LIKE. This ‘bracketing’ like construction clarifies that the focal information in (11a) includes both adjectives (sad and quiet) and in (11b) and (11c) the entire adverbial/ adjectival phrase and not simply the intensifier really. The utterances in (11) are also useful for distinguishing FOCUS from EMPHASIS. Focal information is frequently emphatic; however, at the theoretical level the two concepts must be kept distinct, as Lambrecht (1994: ch. 5) has argued. The FOCUS/ EMPHASIS distinction is pertinent to Miller and Weinert’s claim that, in contrast to other focus markers in British English, such as it-clefts or wh-clefts, pre-posed like is a non-contrastive, non-presentational focus marker that can be used to focus new or given information or entities (1998: 319). Thus, the pragmatic division of labor in examples like (11) and (12) is such that like marks FOCUS while EMPHASIS is conveyed by the intensifying adverbs (bolded): (12) a. What he said was LIKE totally inappropriate for a rabbi to say b. That’s because . . . it’s because you can’t shoot people from LIKE really far away In the majority of our French examples, genre functions as a focus marker. In addition to (1), repeated here for convenience, consider (13)–(16): (1) Elle téléphone GENRE dix fois par jour. ‘She calls LIKE ten times a day.’ (13) Elle est GENRE méchante avec les cas, cette prof. ‘That teacher, she’s LIKE mean to the problem kids.’ (14) Ils ont mis GENRE deux espaces fumeurs par étage. ‘They’ve set up LIKE two smoking areas on each floor.’⁷

Discourse markers across languages

(15) Il saute GENRE 1m 30 sans peine. ‘He can jump LIKE a meter 30 easily.’ (16) Elle fait des contrôles GENRE toutes les semaines. ‘She gives tests LIKE every week.’ In (1) and (14)–(16) the focal information is an expression of quantity. Likewise in the examples with like in (17): (17) a. She’s been here for LIKE three weeks now. b. I dropped and added LIKE two or three courses. c. That happened LIKE ten years ago. In these examples the marker meaning can be understood as an extension of the lexical meaning ‘approximately,’ a meaning perhaps more transparent in (18): (18) Greg is like seven or eight feet tall (Underhill, 234) For Underhill, like in this example is not yet a discourse marker. But if not, the sentence is sufficiently ambiguous to constitute a good transitional or ‘bridging’ example between the APPROXIMATIVE (one type of HEDGE) and FOCUS meanings. Notice that without the markers, (14)–(17) are straightforward statements involving quantification. But with the markers, in addition to signaling a lack of preciseness and/or that preciseness is unnecessary or inappropriate in the situation at issue (cf. Schourup, 38–41), certain of these utterances convey a modal nuance, or valeur énonciative, suggesting that from the speaker’s perspective the quantity reported infringes the norm, being either too much (1, 15–18) or too little (14). In other examples, this nuance of speaker evaluation might be interpreted as a surprisal evidential, signaling that the focused information is contrary to the speaker’s expectations, along the lines of what Slobin and Aksu (1982) have called the “unprepared mind” and others “mirative”: (19) Last week he was complaining how broke he is and now he’s LIKE buying a BMW. (20) Un jour elle nous fait l’imparfait et GENRE la semaine d’après on passe au passé simple ‘One day she’s having us do the imperfect and LIKE the next week we’re on to the passé simple!’ Like the speakers of (14)–(17), whose use of the markers signals that in their view the stated quantity is inappropriate, the speakers of (19) and (20) clearly perceive an incongruity or inappropriateness between the two propositions connected by the focus markers.

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Hedge In the examples above involving expressions of quantity, in addition to focusing the expression of quantity, the markers instruct addressees not to interpret the stated quantities as exact: don’t take this number too literally, it’s only approximate. A type of a HEDGE, in other words. In utterances that don’t involve an expression of quantification, the approximative sense often takes the form of an epistemic (or evidential) HEDGE. In some cases ‘sorta’, ‘kinda,’ or in French, ‘du genre de, de ce genre’ can express essentially the same thing, signaling that whatever is in the markers’ scope should not be taken too literally: (21) C’était GENRE glauque. ‘It was LIKE/kinda drab’ (22) Il est à l’Académie des Sciences; ça fait GENRE équivalent chercheur au CNRS. ‘He’s with the Academy of Science; that’s (sorta) LIKE (being) a researcher at the CNRS’ (cf. also 6a, 8b) In others cases the HEDGE functions interpersonally, enabling a speaker to lessen the abruptness (23), assertiveness (24), or perceived inappropriateness of a statement (25, 26) or speech-act (27): (23) What about LIKE ‘demon’ ? [suggestion made by a student to a teacher in class] (24) A: Come over any time. B: LIKE . . . right now? (25) IT’S LIKE the winter in Chicago sucks (Underhill, # 63) (26) IT WAS LIKE Dr. Weiss was pretty good about [patients who take] narcotics⁸ (27) Je me demandais si tu pourrais GENRE me donner un coup de main ‘I was wondering if you could LIKE give me a hand?’ (cf. also (13)) Examples in which the markers have a HEDGE function are frequent. They may indicate hesitation on the speaker’s part, the tentative nature of a suggestion, an acknowledgment of the possible inappropriateness of certain speech-acts (notably requests and questions), politeness, or a combination of these ‘expressive’ meanings.

For example: elaboration, justification, explanation Frequently like connects two segments of discourse of which the second, the focused information, provides an example, explanation, justification, or elaboration of the first. The freeway accident in (9a), repeated below, is offered as an explanation or justification for why the speaker didn’t come to class. In (2), (28) and (29) the material introduced by genre has this same function vis-à-vis the preceding clause:

Discourse markers across languages

(9a) I couldn’t come to class yesterday, LIKE I had this accident on the freeway (2) Ce jean, il me va mieux, GENRE il me serre déjà moins ‘These jeans are better on me, they’re LIKE not as tight’ (28) Le chinois, c’est vraiment une belle langue, GENRE à l’épicerie, hier, la vendeuse, quand elle parlait, c’était comme si elle chantait ‘Chinese is really a beautiful language; LIKE at the food shop yesterday, the salesperson, when she was talking, it was as if she were singing’ (29) Il a vraiment rien dans la tête, celui là, GENRE il ouvre son cartable et ya toujours quelque chose qui lui manque ‘The guy’s a flake, LIKE every time he goes to get something in his school bag it’s not there’ In (2) the fact that “these jeans are not as tight” explains why the speaker finds them more acceptable. In (28) the series of clauses following genre are offered to validate the speaker’s assertion about the beauty of Chinese. And in (29), the speaker justifies her negative comment on her classmate via an example: he never has what he needs in his school bag.

Interpretive quotative The fourth major function of our two DMs we have decided to call the “interpretive” or “double-voiced” QUOTATIVE. In a number of examples like/genre introduce segments of discourse that look like directly reported speech or thought: (3) Quand je lui ai dit que t’étais pas sûr de venir elle était vraiment pas contente, GENRE: “si vous jouez pas je chante pas” ‘When I told her you weren’t sure you were coming [to her party] she was really upset, LIKE: “if you won’t play [the piano], I won’t sing”’ (30) And I’M LIKE: “What the hell’s going on here?” (31) Les étrangers, ils nous englobent dans un tout, GENRE:“on est pas surpris, ça se passe toujours comme ça en France” ‘Foreigners, they put us all in the same basket; LIKE: “what do you expect? The French are always like that”’ (32) Elle veut plus nous donner de fiches de lecture à faire à la maison, GENRE QUE c’est trop tard dans l’année ‘She doesn’t want to give us any more reading assignments to do at home, LIKE it’s too late in the year’ (33) Le prof il a dit à Joanna hier: “fais gaffe, t’as pas le niveau pour l’Ecole Estienne,” GENRE QU‘elle dessine comme un pied. ‘The teacher told Joanna yesterday, “you’re not good enough to get into the École Estienne,” LIKE she can’t draw worth a damn!’

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The punctuation (colon + quotes) in (3), (30), and (31) is simply a written-language convention introduced here to indicate that what follows GENRE/BE+LIKE has the form of a direct quote. But the “quotations” introduced by these markers are rarely if ever verbatim — or ostensibly verbatim — speech reports;⁹ rather, what they provide are an approximation and notably one that conveys the quoting speaker’s interpretation of what the quoted speaker(s) said or may have thought, often in a highly condensed version. Thus, in (3), the sentence following genre (“if you won’t play, I won’t sing”) represents a distillation of a lengthy exchange, attributed to the quoted speaker, between that speaker (‘she’) and the higher-level addressee (‘you’). In (31), the quotation is attributed to a hypothetical speaker: the prototypical foreigner who lumps all the French together. In (32), the speaker reports her teacher’s decision not to give the class any more reading homework. The clause following genre (“it’s too late in the year”) is a verbalization of what she imagines to be her teacher’s rationale for this decision. This example also illustrates the bridge between the QUOTATIVE and EXAMPLE functions. Finally, in (33), the teacher’s skepticism about Joanna’s plan to attend a prestigious school of design is quoted directly; the statement “like she can’t draw worth a damn” is, again, the quoting speaker’s interpretation of what she imagines their teacher was thinking. Whence our label “interpretive quotative” (cf. Schourup 1985; Tannen 1986; Romaine and Lange 1991; Ferrara and Bell 1995; Fleischman 1998).

Quoted thought Interpretive quotatives often report thought rather than a quoted speaker’s actual words, as evidenced by several examples: (34) She was telling herself LIKE don’t cry now. (35) And I’M LIKE, OK, how am I gonna get her ‘chief complaint’ out of her? (36) Elle me demande tout le temps de l’aider, GENRE elle a rien compris au cours ‘She’s always asking me to help her, LIKE she hasn’t understood anything in class!’ (37) Elle fait une tête, GENRE tout le monde devrait être à ses pieds ‘She gets this look on her face, LIKE everyone should worship the ground she walks on’ Examples (34) and (35) are statements by medical students reporting on their experiences learning to interview patients. The patient quoted in (34) obviously didn’t say to herself out loud “don’t cry now”; this is the interviewer’s interpretation of her thoughts, inferred presumably from the look on her face. And in (35), what the student reports is his own thought process about how to get a reluctant patient to tell him what she had come in for; he obviously did not utter these words in front of

Discourse markers across languages

her, notwithstanding the direct-quote form of the report. Similarly, in (36) and (37) genre introduces verbalizations of thoughts, the speaker’s own in (36) — offered by way of EXPLANATION — and those of the subject ‘she’ in (37).

Quoted attitude Whenever multiple speakers are “quoted,” this must be interpreted as indexing quoted thought or quoted attitude, given the unlikelihood of everyone producing precisely the same words: (38) a.

Les gens applaudissent à tout rompre pendant deux minutes et après il y a un silence de mort GENRE fais nous rire maintenant et t’as intérêt à être bon. [interview with a comedian] ‘People applaud like mad for a couple minutes and then there’s dead silence, LIKE now make us laugh and you’d better be real good.’ b. Queena Kim said that a professor had asked, “Aren’t you excited to wake up and read the news?” And the students ARE LIKE, “Not really.” (Rob Morse, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 Sept. 1998, A2)

In (38b) “not really” is likely a verbal rendering of gestures or expressions on the students’ faces in response to the professor’s ‘naive’ question.¹⁰ It is often the case that what genre/be like introduce are gestures, facial expressions, or other non-verbal expressions of quoted attitude: (39) So then she tells me the baby’s by herself, and I’M LIKE . . . [facial expression of shock] (40) We were all lighting up and HE WAS LIKE . . . [facial expression of disgust]

Ironic quotation Quotations introduced by genre/be like are not infrequently ironic (signaled typically by intonation or change in voice quality):¹¹ (41) LIKE I’m Mr Popular! (42) Yeah, sure, LIKE I haven’t heard that one before (Haiman 1998: 53) (43) LIKE I was even remotely interested (44) Tu sais à quelle heure elle nous remplace son cours GENRE pour pas nous déranger? à huit heures samedi! ‘You know what time she [the teacher] picked for her make-up class, so it wouldn’t LIKE interfere with our schedules? 8 o’clock Saturday morning!’ Example (44) was produced by a student annoyed about the time her teacher had chosen for a make-up class. Superimposed onto the thought quotation attributed to

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the teacher (bolded) is the sarcasm of the student/speaker obliged to roust herself out of bed all too early on a Saturday morning. In all these examples, like and genre enable dual-voiced utterances in which narrators can use the direct-quote form to report thoughts/attitudes they attribute to participants in their narratives while at the same time superimposing onto those internal quotations their own evaluative judgments (cf. Sperber and Wilson’s 1981 “echoic mention”).

Why quote? The question naturally arises as to why a speaker would choose to present in the form of a direct quote something that was not actually said but was merely a thought or, more likely, a constructed thought (except in fictional worlds we have no access to the contents of other minds). The most compelling explanation is the effect of performance (vs. simply reporting) that many have now associated with the use of direct-speech forms in oral narrative. As Ferrara and Bell (1995: 283) put it: “We see be + like as taking up the function of the obsolete soliloquy in its ability to heighten drama with an indication of inner state. . . . [T]he prototypical case of be + like is a theatrical, highly conventionalized utterance which makes the inner state transparent to the audience.”

Co-occurrence with other markers Like DMs in general, like and genre are not required for utterances in which they occur, i.e., they may be deleted without any appreciable change in propositional meaning.¹² They may also co-occur with other DMs. In English like is often found in the company of I mean and you know: (45) . . . when you’re considering paying for public services, should you, should you pay LIKE in advance LIKE through the National Insurance System or LIKE, LIKE I MEAN the French Health Service for example, people pay it for ambulances when they use them, though they pay on a differential rate . . . (BNC) (46) That’s all right I MEAN LIKE I actually sort of worked out about another two or three tapes yesterday (BNC) As these examples indicate, either marker can appear within the scope of the other.¹³ In (47) genre co-occurs with the DM style (pronounced [stil] or anglicized as [stajl]), also prominent among younger speakers: (47) C’est un mec GENRE STYLE zonard. ‘He’s KINDA LIKE a dropout’¹⁴

Discourse markers across languages

According to our interpretation of this example, genre focuses zonard while style hedges it, though there appears to be functional overlap between these two French markers.¹⁵ Like as a QUOTATIVE can also co-occur with its functional analogues, i.e., with other quotatives: (48) And she said LIKE I took to him instantly (BNC) (49) Well this is it, we’ve said LIKE there’s so much that everybody’s got to pay for non-payers, isn’t there? (BNC) (50) Why did they go LIKE do you have to do it both together? (BNC) In these examples, we would argue that say/go indicate that speech occurred; like that the reported utterance is a less than precise rendering of the words uttered. Like evidentially distances the quoting speaker from the quoted utterance, at the same time allowing it to be rephrased, often completely, from the quoting speaker’s perspective. In this sense it resembles an indirect speech report, while preserving the form of a direct speech report. The co-occurrence of multiple markers is not a redundancy; rather, in any given situation each marker is presumably carrying out a different pragmatic function, even in situations of markers that can substitute for one another functionally.

Diachronic development of like and genre The striking functional similarities of these two markers raise questions about diachronic parallelism — have the two markers followed parallel functional itineraries? — and, at a broader level, about the extent to which languages might be expected to develop certain kinds of DMs crucial to the management of conversation. The histories of like and genre are not entirely parallel.¹⁶ But at a point in their respective trajectories, each developed a comparative meaning — ‘something like that’, ‘quelque chose de ce genre’ — whereby an item is considered in relation to a norm or paradigm, or as an approximation of that norm: (51) a. She sings like a bird. b. I’ve been working like crazy. (52)

The sculpture looked quite human-like. (Romaine and Lange, #24b)

(53)

He brought along things for the picnic, food, drinks, and such-like. (idem, #24a)

(54)

J’ai entendu un bruit de camion genre poubelle. ‘I heard a truck noise like (the kind) the truck makes that empties the garbage cans.’

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We agree with Romaine and Lange (1991) and Miller and Weinert (1998) that the pragmatic functions of like have their origin in this comparative meaning, and we would make the same claim for genre. So how, then, did these lexical items come to function pragmatically?

Development of the pragmatic functions Several investigators have noted a universal link between comparison and FOCUS. As Haiman (1988: 310) states it: “[a] comparative construction is one which contrasts, and hence, focuses the elements which are compared; . . . the element compared . . . [being] more highlighted.” Nølke (1983) argues similarly that the primary function of adverbes paradigmatisants (~ focus markers) is to relate the focused element to an assumed set of alternatives (the “paradigm”). This sense of a ‘paradigm’ is clear in (55) and (56a), in which like has the meanings ‘for example’ and ‘approximately’, respectively: (55) He bought several beautiful presents, like a magnificent paperweight and jewelry (Romaine and Lange, #31) (56a) That dress I bought, it was like from when my mother was young [i.e., it approximates those worn when . . .] From the approximative sense of (56a), in which like still makes a lexical contribution, it is but a short step to the pragmatic function of HEDGING, or signaling a “loose,” approximative relationship between the words uttered and the idea to be conveyed: (56b) That dress I bought, it was from like the forties [i.e. roughly the decade of the forties] (57) You know, I came along kinda like in another era [i.e. somewhat later than the other jazz musicians under discussion] (Etta James, radio interview) In (58)–(60), comparative like introduces speech reports. In these examples the quote segments are offered not as faithful reports of words actually uttered but as paradigmatic exemplars: one statement among others, similar in form and content, that might have been produced in the circumstances in question: (58) My mother would always say stuff like: “Now, don’t go out without your coat!” (59) Miss Lewinsky asked me something like: “What if they ask me about the gifts you’ve given me?” (Bill Clinton, grand jury testimony) (60) Elle me sort toujours des trucs genre: “Laisse tomber, c’est pas la peine.” ‘She always comes out with things like: “Forget it, it’s not worth it.”’ Relevant also to an explanation of the functional evolution from FOCUS MARKER to QUOTATIVE is the fact that the paradigmatic citations introduced by like and genre

Discourse markers across languages

almost invariably take the form of direct quotes (58–60), and a direct quote is always the focus of an utterance in which it occurs. Put differently, a strategy commonly used by narrators to focus a piece of information — and dramatize it — is to package that information as a direct quote. The QUOTATIVE function of our two particles thus represents a natural extension of an item already operating as a FOCUS marker.

Historical synopsis of like and genre To recapitulate, then, we have traced a semantic pathway that leads from a basic (Lexical/Propositional) meaning of COMPARISON, via the notion of APPROXIMATION, or a PARADIGMATIC EXAMPLE, to a set of interrelated Pragmatic functions: at the Textual/Discourse level, the function of marking particular chunks of information as FOCUS, and the Expressive/Interpersonal level¹⁷ the functions of HEDGING¹⁸ (in various forms) and providing an INTERPRETIVE QUOTATIVE (the starting point for the latter being a quotation presented as “paradigmatic”).¹⁹ This development is schematized in Figure 1. In Fleischman (in preparation) the interrelationship among these functions is described in greater detail, with attention to the fact that both the FOCUS and the HEDGE functions lead naturally to the QUOTATIVE function, the most recent of the pragmatic functions to emerge in the various languages that display parallel markers.

Discourse markers across languages: toward a theory of pragmatic universals We come finally to the larger, theoretical issue raised by our data and the functional parallelism they present. In a recent study of the English DMs indeed, in fact, and besides — which, we note, have French equivalents that have evolved from similar lexical sources — Traugott (1995/1997) poses the question of “whether there are cross-language generalizations to be made about the development of discourse particles in terms of both their likely semantic sources and their semantic–pragmatic

Propositional

Textual

Expressive

Expression of COMPARISON

FOCUS

INTERPRETIVE QUOTATIVE

(Similarity/Approximation/ PARADIGMATIC EXAMPLE)

HEDGE

Figure 1. Functional evolution of like and genre

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paths” (1997: 4). Along similar lines, Hansen (1998: 85) notes that DMs tend both synchronically and diachronically to have a number of more or less closely related uses, and to have evolved from items belonging to other word classes. Given the synchronic focus of her investigation, the challenge for her is to account for this state of affairs without having to postulate strings of homonyms.²⁰ It is not clear, however, that the similarities can be accounted for without looking to diachrony. The two markers here under survey can surely shed some light on this question of discourse markers — and discourse functions — across languages. Synchronically, like and genre show a striking functional similarity, as we have seen, and diachronically they have evolved from lexical sources which, while not identical at the outset, have at different points in their respective histories arrived at a meaning (‘comparison’) that was conducive to the eventual development of the marker functions they now display. In line with Hopper’s (1991) principle of “persistence” in grammaticalization, we should not be surprised that the nature of the lexical sources determines to some extent the uses of the markers that derive from them.²¹ The lexical meanings of like and genre have, moreover, remained in the respective languages together with the marker functions. The interest of our data for cross-language pragmatics lies in presenting a casestudy in which similarly functioning discourse markers in two languages have evolved, independently, from similar lexical sources and have followed relatively parallel paths of development, particularly once they came to function as pragmatic operators. If additional cases of the same parallelisms can be found, these might be used to identify lexical sources and pathways of pragmaticization for DMs in the same way as we have identified lexical sources and pathways of grammaticalization for many grammatical categories. We might then be able to predict that, e.g., expressions of COMPARISON/APPROXIMATION may give rise to FOCUS markers, HEDGES, and/or QUOTATIVES. On the basis of synchronic data, a number of potentially parallel situations have already been identified. The examples below — involving Italian tipo (che) (‘type, kind’), parallel to Fr genre (que), Finnish niinku (< niin kuin ‘as if ’), Swedish liksom (lik ‘like’ + som ‘as’), German (und ich/er) so (‘thus, in this way’), Japanese nanka ‘like’ (< nani ‘what’ + question particle ka), and Hebrew ke’ilu ‘as if ’ — offer a representative sampling of markers — or emerging markers — that appear to parallel like and genre: (61) . . . cioè meno anni de Michele, TIPO CHE sta con una che, che ha vent’anni più di me. (Italian) ‘. . . that is, younger than Michele, LIKE he’s got one [a woman] who’s 20 years older than me’ (62) Se kurssi on NIINKU todella vaikee mulle, mä en NIINKU ollenkaan tajuu mistä siellä NIINKU puhutaan. (Finnish) ‘That class is LIKE really hard for me, LIKE I don’t understand at all what they’re LIKE talking about’

Discourse markers across languages

(63) Jag tittade på honom och LIKSOM inte en chans! (Swedish) ‘I looked at him and LIKE no way!’ (64) Ich sagte ihm, dass er gehen muss. UND ER SO ich werde es mir überlegen. (German) ‘I told him he had to go. and he’s like I’ll think about it’ (65) NANKA biiru to pizza tte awanai ki ga suru. (Japanese) ‘IT’S LIKE I don’t think beer and pizza go together’ (66) Hu haya normali KE’ILU? (Hebrew) ‘Was he LIKE normal? Discourse markers, Hansen observes, constitute language-specific systems, such that a given marker in language X rarely has one and only one equivalent in language Y (Hansen 1995: 7–8). This is not surprising, since even within a single language, markers commonly display functional overlap. Nor is this situation qualitatively different from the problem of cross-language comparison of grammatical categories (see, e.g. Dahl 1985: ch. 1; Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994). But to the extent that markers are translatable — a premise our data strongly support — and given the high probability that certain pragmatic functions are if not universal then at least widely attested across languages, it seems that cross-language pragmatics would be well served by additional studies testing out the findings of this investigation on data from other languages and/or similarly slanted studies of other discourse/pragmatic functions. Such studies might proceed by first identifying the markers used by different languages to carry out particular functions crucial to conversation management, then tracing the histories of these markers through their various stages of functional-semantic and syntactic development. Studies of this type would undoubtedly shed important light on Traugott’s crucial question quoted above concerning cross-language generalizations about the development of DMs.

Notes 1. In this chapter we use the term Discourse Markers synonymously with what others prefer to call Pragmatic Markers (see Fraser 1996, 1999), restricting the term Discourse Markers to items whose function necessarily involves a relationship between two segments of discourse. See Brinton (1996: 29–40) for a summary of definitions of DMs (also Jucker and Ziv 1998: 1–4), marker functions, and competing terminology. 2. In the Longman Spoken American English Corpus, like apparently occurs 9,010 times per million words (for comparison, I guess logs only 756 instances per million words), or an average of once every 130 words (Stern 1998: 16–17). For speakers under age 25, the figure is undoubtedly much higher; in Jucker and Smith’s (1998) corpus of Southern California college students it is said to occur once every 21 seconds in conversations between strangers, once every 13 seconds in conversations between friends. A sociolinguistic analysis of like

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Suzanne Fleischman and Marina Yaguello falls outside the purview of this study (see Romaine and Lange 1991; Ferrara and Bell 1995; Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999), the data for which are drawn from the published literature, the British National Corpus (BNC), and data collected by the authors. 3. Schourup (1985: 54–55) notes, however, the oddity of like in positions where a pause (to consider how to continue) would also be inappropriate, e.g. *I did, like, not! On the syntactic distribution of like, see Underhill (1988: 242–244) and Haiman (1993: 304–307), on that of genre, Yaguello (1998); Fleischman (1998) compares the two. 4. Looking at the development of the English DMs indeed, in fact, and besides, Traugott (1995) notes that counter to recently developed criteria for grammaticalization, these markers have increased rather than decreased their syntactic scope, moving from clause-internal adverbs to sentence adverbials to discourse particles. Both genre que and the marker uses of like represent similar increases in syntactic scope. 5. Andersen’s account draws on and can only be arrived at, he claims, by appeal to Relevance Theory because of the distinction RT draws between procedural and conceptual information. Like, per this account, is “a pragmatic marker of loose use of language, encoding a procedural constraint on the explicatures of utterances” (Andersen 1998: 148, our emphasis). Schourup made essentially the same claim some fifteen years earlier (his dissertation dates from 1983), albeit without the conceptual apparatus of RT. As “an item which . . . indicates a possible loose fit between overt expression and intended meaning”(Schourup 1985: 61), like is by definition “a signal that tells the hearer how the utterance is to be understood” (Andersen, p. 151). 6. This construction is discussed in Miller and Weinert (1998: 331–334). Schourup (1985: 47–48) offers a few examples of post-posed like as the final element of questions. 7. This example and others like it in which the focal information is quite precise, challenge the claims for “loose talk” as a pragmatic umbrella capable of subsuming all uses of like or genre. 8. The clause-initial phrase it’s/it was like occurs with sufficient frequency in our American data to raise the question of its being a construction in its own right. Schourup (1985: 59– 61) feels that it has the same “evincive” meaning as like by itself, interpreting it as referring to what the speaker has in mind to express. 9. It is now widely acknowledged that nearly all (non-tape recorded) reports of speech and thought are fictive and approximative (cf. Ducrot 1984; Tannen 1986, 1989; Mayes 1990; Chafe 1994, among others); what the convention (expressed in writing by quotation marks) communicates is simply an instruction to the addressee to construe the segment thus marked as a more or less faithful report of words spoken. 10. It is presumably because (38b) appears in a written source that the writer chose to ‘translate’ the students’ paralinguistic response into actual language. 11. Mathis and Yule (1994: 69) observe this same phenomenon in constructed dialogue introduced by “zero quotatives,” while Leech and Short (1981: 327, 336) note that Free Indirect Discourse is often used in literature as a vehicle for irony, allowing as it does for two points of view. Quotatives with like/genre are functionally, if not formally, a variety of FID (Fleischman 1995, 1998; Yaguello 1998). 12. As suggested above, differences of meaning will be of an ‘expressive’ (modal/evidential) nature. See also Schourup, 39–42.

Discourse markers across languages 13. Like, as noted above, can signal a rewording, expansion, or justification of a preceding utterance. It introduces a metalinguistic comment by the speaker on his/her own words. In this capacity it overlaps functionally with and can often be substituted by I mean (you mean in questions) and/or you know. Per Schiffrin (1987: chap. 9), I mean orients toward the speaker’s own talk (modification of ideas and intentions), maintaining attention on the speaker; you know gains attention from the hearer opening an interactive focus on speaker-provided information. Jucker and Smith (1998: 174) classify all three devices as “presentation” markers, i.e. markers used to accompany or modify a speaker’s own information (vs. “reception markers, which react to information provided by another speaker). However, they consider like to be “information centered” whereas the other two are “addressee-centered.” 14. Zonard ‘dropout’ derives from the colloquial term for the fringes of society, la zone. In France this socio-economically defined area tends to be located at the urban periphery — la zone — rather than in the inner city, as in the States. 15. Cf. the following example, from a shopkeeper: Je fais STYLE 25–30% sur une partie de la collection. ‘I’m taking off LIKE 25–30 % on some of the merchandise’. Style has not been formally studied, to our knowledge; its functions, and overlap with genre, remain to be elucidated. 16. For details of the history of like, see Romaine and Lange (1991: 244–251). The history of genre is sketched briefly in Yaguello 1998. 17. We follow here Traugott’s model (1982) of the three components of the linguistic system at which meanings/functions can be realized: Propositional, Textual, and Expressive (= Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) Referential, Textual, Interpersonal). Our assignment of the QUOTATIVE and FOCUS functions to the Interpersonal and Textual components respectively is the reverse of what Romaine and Lange (1991: 26) suggest. 18. We depart here from Andersen’s (1998) assignment of this (procedural) use of like to the Textual component. 19. Note that both HEDGES and INTERPRETIVE QUOTATIVES are subsumable under the umbrella of “loose talk” (Andersen 1998) or a “loose fit” (Schourup 1985) between the segment of discourse over which the marker has scope and its mental template in the speaker’s mind. 20. Homonymy (between propositional and marker meanings) appears not to be a problem for speakers, however. If it poses a theoretical problem for descriptive linguists, one way out, Hansen suggests, is via appeal to Lichtenberk’s notion of ‘heterosemy,’ i.e. situations “(within a single language) where two or more meanings or functions that are historically related, in the sense of deriving from the same source, are carried by reflexes of the common source element that belong in different morphosyntactic categories” (Lichtenberk 1991: 476). 21. “When a form undergoes grammaticalization from a lexical to a grammatical function, so long as it is grammatically viable some traces of its original lexical meanings tend to adhere to it, and details of its lexical history may be reflected in constraints on its grammatical distribution” (Hopper 1991: 22).

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References Andersen, G. 1998. “The pragmatic marker like from a relevance-theoretic perspective.” In Discourse Markers: Descriptions and theory, A. Jucker and Y. Ziv (eds.), 147–170. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blyth, C. Jr., Recktenwald, S. and Wang, J. 1990.“I’m like,‘say what?!’: A new quotative.” American Speech 65: 215–227. Brinton, L. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Butters, R. 1982. “Editor’s note.” American Speech 57: 149. Bybee, J., Perkins, R., and Pagliuca, W. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chafe, W. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dahl, Ö. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell. Ducrot, O. 1984. “Esquisse d’une théorie polyphonique de l’énonciation.” In Le Dire et le dit, 171–233. Paris: Minuit. Ferrara, K. and B. Bell. 1995. “Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be + like.” American Speech 70: 265–290. Fleischman, S. 1995. “Imperfective and irrealis.” In Modality in Grammar and Discourse, J. L. Bybee and S. Fleischman (eds.), 519–551. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fleischman, S. 1998. “Les Jumeaux du discours.” La Linguistique 34: 31–48. Fleischman, S. In preparation. “Pragmatic markers in comparative perspective.” Fraser, B. 1996. “Pragmatic markers.” Pragmatics 6: 167–190. Fraser, B. 1999. “What are discourse markers?” Journal of Pragmatics 3: 931–952. Haiman, J. 1988. “Incorporation, parallelism, and focus.” In Studies in Syntactic Typology, M. Hammond, E. Moravcsik, and J. R. Worth (eds.), 303–320. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haiman, J. 1993. “Life, the universe, and human language (a brief synopsis).” Language Sciences 15: 293–322. Haiman, J. 1998. Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, alienation, and the evolution of language. New York: Oxford. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Hansen, M.-B. Mosegaard. 1998. The Function of Discourse Particles: A study with special reference to Spoken French. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, P. J. 1991. “On some principles of grammaticalization.” In Approaches to Grammaticalization, E. C. Traugott and B. Heine (eds.), I: 17–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jucker, A. H. and S.W. Smith. 1998.“And people just you know like ‘wow’. Discourse markers as negotiating strategies.” In Discourse Markers: Descriptions and theory, A. H. Jucker and Y. Ziv (eds.), 172–201. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, A. H. and Y. Ziv. 1998. “Discourse markers.” In Discourse Markers: Description and theory. A. H. Jucker and Y. Ziv (eds.), 1–12. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leech, G. N. and M. H. Short 1981. Style in Fiction. London: Longman.

Discourse markers across languages Lichtenberk, F. 1991. “Semantic change and heterosemy in grammaticalization.” Language 67: 475–509. Mathis, T. and G. Yule 1994. “ ‘Zero quotatives’”. Discourse Processes 18: 63–76. Mayes, P. 1990. “Quotation in spoken English.” Studies in Language 14: 325–363. Miller, J. and R. Weinert. 1998. Spontaneous Spoken Language: Syntax and discourse. Oxford: Clarendon. Nølke, H. 1983. Les Adverbes paradigmatisants: Fonction et analyse. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Poplack, S. 1989.“The care and handling of a mega-corpus: The Ottawa–Hull French project.” In Language Change and Variation, R. Fasold and D. Schiffrin (eds.), 411–451. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Romaine, S. and D. Lange. 1991. “The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress.” American Speech 66: 227–279. Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schourup, L. C. 1985. Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation. New York: Garland (diss. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1983). Slobin, D. I. and A. A. Aksu. 1982. “Tense, aspect, and modality in the use of the Turkish evidential.” In Tense–Aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics, P. J. Hopper (ed.), 185–200. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1981. “Irony and the use-mention distinction.” In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York: Academic Press. Stern, K. 1998. “The Longman spoken American corpus: Providing an in-depth analysis of everyday English.” Longman Language Review 3: 14–17. Tagliamonte, S. and R. Hudson. 1999. “Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and American youth.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147–172. Tannen, D. 1986. “Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and literary narrative.” In Direct and Indirect Speech, F. Coulmas (ed.), 311–32. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tannen, D. 1989. Talking Voices. New York: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, E. C. 1982.“From propositional to textual and expressive meanings. Some semanticpragmatic aspects of grammaticalization.” In Perspectives on Historical Linguistics, W. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds). 245–271. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Traugott, E. C. 1995. “The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization.” International Conference on Historical Linguistics XII, Manchester, August, 1995 (version of 11/97). Underhill, R. 1988. “Like is, like, focus.” American Speech 63: 234–246. Yaguello, M. 1998. “Genre, une particule d’un genre nouveau.” In Petits faits de langue, 18–24. Paris: Seuil.

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CHAPTER 9

Intertextuality across communities of practice Academics, journalism and advertising Ron Scollon Georgetown University

Borrowed words¹ And they who write, because all write, have still That excuse for writing, and for writing ill. But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw Rankly digested, doth those things out spew, As his own things; and they are his own, ‘tis true, For if one eat my meat, though it be known The meat was mine, th’excrement is his own. —John Donne (Satire 2) [Penguin Books, A. J. Smith, ed., l. 23–30)

You may take my words and use them. If you don’t let on where you got them, it’s plagiarism; if you cite them carefully with a tidy verb of reporting — “Ron said, ‘Don’t steal my words.”’ — it’s called direct quotation. Between these two extremes lies the territory I would like to examine here. My purpose in this chapter is to study the use of reported speech or what is more broadly called discourse representation (Fairclough 1992) in three different communities of practice, academic writing, journalism, and advertising. While my focus is mostly on academic writing, I will make frequent recourse to spoken language, particularly in television news and advertising. In any event there is little in what I will say about writing that could not also be applied to speaking. I will argue that discourse representation and the related phenomenon, production format (Goffman 1974, 1981) varies functionally across these three communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Chaiklin and Lave 1993). That is, I will argue that both the kinds of intertextuality and the amounts vary across these communities and the means used to represent intertextuality are also variable. Therefore, I will argue, we need to exercise great caution in the study of intertextuality and discourse representation not to assume universal strategies nor one-to-one correspondences between the means of discourse representation and the sociocultural positionings of text which are accomplished.

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Reported speech, intertextuality, and discourse representation Van der Wurff ’s (1997) excellent bibliography of reported discourse runs to hundreds of entries. This attests to the considerable interest in reported discourse in recent years. Within this linguistically oriented focus on reported discourse are such studies as Hamilton’s (1996, 1998) studies of direct quotation in the language of Alzheimer’s and bone marrow transplant patients. In the latter case Hamilton showed that members of an internet-based support group used direct quotation as a means of distancing themselves from their doctors and other health-care providers. In doing this, Hamilton argues, support group members were able to undercut the authority of medical discourse on the one hand and on the other to position themselves as survivors rather than victims of their condition. Many of the studies which have taken an interest in reported discourse and intertextuality have focused on journalistic discourse. Most often these have located themselves as critical discourse analyses (Fairclough (1992, 1995). CaldasCoulthard (1993, 1994; and Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard 1996) has argued, for example, that the voices of women are significantly less represented in news discourse. Further, when women are represented they are most frequently positioned as adjuncts to men, not as independent agents. Elsewhere (Scollon 1998a) I have argued that in news discourse, journalists use the linguistic means of reported discourse to delegate principalship (Goffman 1974 1981) or the responsibility for what is said to newsmakers. Thus they are able to position themselves as free of responsibility or liability for the words, concepts, and ideas of the newsmakers they quote. Yung (1995; S. Scollon and Yung 1997) has argued that in the Chinese press the primary uses of reported discourse are to query, question, or set into doubt the utterances of newsmakers. This latter point suggests that reported discourse, or discourse representation, is not uniform across languages. Yung’s (1995) research makes it clear that, historically, discourse representation in Chinese is much less direct than it is taken to be in English, though this latter point will have to be clarified below as well. Furthermore, Yung and S. Scollon (1997) studied two newsstories, one generated locally and one received from international sources. Both stories were produced in both English and Chinese for newspapers in Hong Kong. In both cases they have shown that the Chinese version of the story, whether local or international, used scare quotes and other means to produce a stronger emotional impact while the English version used quotation more ‘objectively’ to represent the speech of participants. Not only does discourse representation vary across languages, even when the same story is concerned, but in a series of studies of multiple versions of the same newsstory Li et al. (1993) found that discourse representation varies across the media of news discourse. At the most obvious level, what is done with direct quotation in print is done through actualities — the presentation of the speaker directly on the screen — in television. And as S. Scollon and Yung (1997) have shown, these

Intertextuality across communities of practice

‘direct’ presentations of speakers speaking to a camera, these ‘actualities’ are no less susceptible to textual manipulation than the so-called ‘direct quotes’ of print journalists. Perhaps more important than the means of direct discourse representation in print and television is the finding that there are abundantly more direct quotations or actualities in television than in print. Television news broadcasts run between 42.6% and 51.6% of all items including actualities while the four newspapers in the study ranged from 34.8% down to 9.5% (Scollon 1998a: 219). In addition to this greater use of direct quotation or actualities in television, there is a much stronger direct identification of the participants in television than in print. These means include not only the direct citations or bylines used in print but also on-screen character identifications, visual images, and self-identifications: “This is Annabel Roberts reporting from Beijing.”

Discourse representation Before going further I should be clearer about how I am using various terms. I have written somewhat casually of ‘reported speech’, ‘reported discourse’, ‘discourse representation’, and ‘intertextuality’. It might be helpful to return to my original example. I began by saying if you use my words but don’t let on where you got them, that’s plagiarism. But of course that doesn’t account for ghost writing, committee writing, speech writing, much academic editorial work, and almost all secretarial work where one person prepares words for another to say or at least to sign a name to. As Goffman (1974, 1981) has so amply pointed out, there is a multitude of positions we may take in relationship to text and in only one of those positions is the person who crafts the text, the author, the person who produces the physical instance of it, the animator, and the person who is responsible for it, the principal the same one person. Such complexities of what Goffman calls the production format are sometimes not taken into consideration in studies of reported speech or reported discourse (Scollon 1994, 1995) which are often focused on the linguistic means and meanings of embedding one text within another. In this Fairclough’s (1992) work is most helpful. He has argued that such linguistic means as quotation and verbs of reporting are on a continuum with presupposition, hedging, metaphor and perhaps an ultimately indefinite number of ways of representing discourses within discourses. All of this, he argues, is better called discourse representation. The question to which this study directs itself is: To what extent does discourse representation vary across communities of practice? Put another way: How do academics, journalists, and advertisers differ in their uses of discourse representation? Or: Can we say that these communities of practice differ from each other in the ways in which texts are represented within other texts and in the functioning of that intertextuality?

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Academic practice Maybe the clearest indication of where the academic world stands on discourse representation can be seen in the glut of citation manuals, style sheets, and permissions and plagiarism guidelines. These guidelines along with the penalties for violation can be found in faculty/staff handbooks for university employees, in student handbooks, and in university employment contracts. Academics are massively on record as strongly opposing any form of plagiarism and as being hypermeticulous in the care with which we cite the sources of the texts we use. At the same time this stance is conflicted and paradoxical as is evidenced in the fact that Stanford University’s booklet on plagiarism was itself plagiarized by the University of Oregon — word for word (Mallon 1989). My concern here, however, is not with plagiarism as I have discussed that to a greater extent elsewhere (Scollon 1994, 1995, 1998b, 1998c). My concern here is to sketch out the dimensions of discourse representation in academic practice so that this practice may be compared to those of journalism and advertising. I will do this in three moves. First I will look at the linguistic means of discourse representation. After those necessarily sketchy observations about the means of discourse representation and the extent to which they are called into use in academic writing, I will then turn to an analysis of the production formats (Goffman 1974, 1981) most typically found in academic articles. This analysis will move toward a functional analysis of discourse representation. Thirdly, I will turn to look at the stance toward discourse representation taken in the academic community of practice. Of course there is really no unitary academic community of practice. For my purposes here, however, I believe it will not prove necessary to dwell upon the internal distinctions which can be found between writing in art history and biology, between management theory and musicology, or between linguistics and engineering. The data I have used cover many kinds of academic writing from research articles to reviews and from journals to book chapters. What I present here should be taken as illustrative of findings rather than as the data themselves which would be better presented elsewhere in a somewhat more quantitative and reductionist manner. To illustrate I will look most closely at a single article, one for which I was one of four co-authors. I do this not out of hubris, but quite to the contrary, I cite myself and my co-authors out of an awareness that examples used to illustrate are often exposed to fairly severe criticism as being essentially bad writing, not illustrative of practice. While this can certainly be argued here, I would prefer for us to suffer the brunt of that criticism ourselves rather than to expose an innocent colleague who is not in the position I am in to color the argument regarding our own text. Thus this use of an article of our own should be understood as not exemplary but simply as exemplifying. The article ‘Blurred genres and fuzzy identities in Hong Kong public discourse: Foundational ethnographic issues’ (Scollon, Bhatia, Li, and Yung 1999) is cited in the prepublication final revision.

Intertextuality across communities of practice

Discourse representation Verbs of reporting and punctuation It would try the patience of the reader to give very much detail about academic practices of quotation, citation, referencing. These will be perhaps painfully familiar. We are all aware that others ‘report’, ‘claim’, or merely ‘suggest’; we ‘find’, ‘show’, and ‘demonstrate’. What might be noted before looking at the ‘Blurred genres’ article is that academic citation practices are formalized considerably beyond anything found in either journalism or advertising. The two primary codes, footnoting and author’s name plus date of publication, while having many variants in practice, constitute highly complex codes which take a considerable apprenticeship to learn to do accurately. Such citation varies, of course, across academic genres with citations being more abundant in research articles than in notes or review articles, more abundant in literature review portions of texts than in data presentation or conclusion portions of texts. The ‘Blurred genres’ paper cites the 103 references in the bibliography 133 times in a manuscript of 7920 words for an average of 1.7 citations per 100 words. Madigan, Johnson and Linton (1995) compared citation across history, literary criticism, and psychology and found that: “Texts in psychology contain more citations than works in literary criticism but somewhat fewer than those in American history.” (p 423) Their figures give about 1.5 citations per 100 words of text for the Journal of American History and for the Journal of Counseling Psychology. The Publication of the Modern Language Association was about .5 citations per 100 words. Their data would suggest the ‘Blurred genres’ paper is positioned closer to practice in history and psychology than to practice in literary criticism on the basis of the relatively high number of citations. As to the specific means of citation, it was surprising to me as one of the coauthors of ‘Blurred genres’ that the prototypical form of discourse representation, the direct quotation in quotation marks with a verb of reporting and an identified speaker or writer — X says, ‘YZ’ — never occurs in the paper. Not one of the 133 citations takes the form of direct quotation.

Table 1. Citations in academic writing Source

Citations per 100

Quotations (or actualities) per 100

Journal of American History Publication of the Modern Language Association Journal of Counseling Psychology ‘Blurred genres . . .’ Applied Linguistics

1.5 0.5 1.5 1.7

0.8 0.3 0.1 0

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If we compare again to Madigan, Johnson, and Linton’s (1995) data, we see that in history they found about .8 direct quotations per 100 words. In literary criticism there were about .3 quotations per 100 words and in psychology a very small number, less than .1 per 100 words. That is, in history and psychology there are large numbers of citations compared to literary criticism, but the citations in psychology are nearly all indirect while those in history or literature are about half indirect. (Table 1 summarizes these figures; Table 2 repeats this summary along with the figures for journalism.) In our ‘Blurred genres’ all citations are indirect and these are accomplished with the social scientific convention of the name of the author(s) and date of publication given parenthetically.

Assertion, presupposition, negation, and hedging Each of these forms of discourse representation makes a contribution, though a decidedly less important one, to the intertextuality of this chapter. While unsupported assertions are largely absent in both the ‘Blurred genres’ article and in academic writing in general, as opening statements they are frequent enough as to take on nearly normative status. For example, in the ‘Blurred genres’ article we find on the first page, A fundamental educational question is: what genres of discourse should students learn? This sentence stands as a positioning of the topic, as a place to begin the argument. Much is presupposed in academic discourse as in all discourse. The most common form in academic discourse amounts to a form of shorthand expression which allows the author to index a point or even a body of research without fuller discussion. For example, in ‘Blurred genres’ we rely upon Ruesch and Bateson’s discussion of the different types of data required in a qualitative study of communication. In the sentence The readership survey provided members’ views (Ruesch and Bateson 1951) in a cross-cutting perspective. there is no clarification of what ‘members’ views’ might mean but the full discussion of Ruesch and Bateson is presupposed. The citation indexes the place where the reader may go to fill out this embedded textuality. Other texts may also be presupposed through negation. We argue that readers and their texts should not be thought of as absorbed in an isolated behavior which is independent of their social environment . . . A discourse on the nature of reading is presupposed by negating the voice of those who run in opposition to it.

Intertextuality across communities of practice

Hedging may be the one thing we academics are best known for outside of academic circles. A few examples will indicate the sort of hedges with which ‘Blurred genres’ is fully encumbered: may be useful some researchers may produce sometimes at least in part influences virtually all

Other forms of discourse representation There is a marked absence in ‘Blurred genres’ of several of the means of discourse representation we and Fairclough have found elsewhere. Notably metaphorical extensions, paraphrasing, irony, fixed phrases, and allusions are difficult to establish within this article and elsewhere within academic writing as well. Thus we can summarize by saying that academic writing uses direct quotation sparingly, indirect quotation and citation frequently, and a variety of other means of discourse representation as well such as presupposition, negation, and hedging.

Production formats The academic community of practice sets out four main participant positions, the research tradition or ‘literature’, the author(s), the subjects of the study (at least in the social sciences), and the reader. If we use Goffman’s (1974, 1981) framework for a moment and consider the distinction among author (the one who produces the wordings of a text), the animator (who produces the actual text as a physical entity), and the principal (who takes responsibility for what is said in the text), it is clear that the typification of the academic article is that it is produced by a unitary authoranimator-principal. In other words, though authorship might be shared out among authors as it was in the example I have given, it is taken as normative that the article itself will be presented in a single authorial voice. Principalship — responsibility for the content — is the ‘author’s’. This is conventionally stated in acknowledgments where any number of other participants might be mentioned from grants councils to research assistants, from journal editors and anonymous reviewers to colleagues, children, parents and life partners. This convention, however, requires that a disclaimer be attached that none of these but the ‘author’ is responsible for what remains as the stated positions taken in the article. If we look at how the pronoun ‘we’ is used in ‘Blurred genres’, the primary use of ‘we’ is to indicate the complexly unitized voice of the 4 co-authors. As I have noted above, there is a stated requirement to speak with a single voice and so this ‘single’ voice is ultimately not that of any of the individual authors.

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We argue that readers and their texts should not be thought of as absorbed in an isolated behavior which is independent of their social environment. [We = co-authors] But the ‘we’ used in the chapter often broadens out somewhat beyond the four co-authors into the entire research group which includes various colleagues not involved in co-authoring the chapter as well as our research assistants. This is a ‘we’ authorized in the acknowledgments. We found that they primarily live in four scenes: at the City University campus, in their homes, in transit between their homes and the university and in the small restaurants and noodles shops they go to, often while in transit. [We = all collaborators and assistants.] More broadly yet, the ‘we’ of the text comes in some cases to involve the reader of the text as well as the authors. When we look more specifically at reading practices. [We = Authors and readers] Most broadly, of course, is the general ‘we’ which has come to replace the now quaint sounding ‘one’. Thus if we see a couple together in public we are careful not simply to walk between them, or to interrupt them as they speak to each other. [We = non-specific person; ‘one’] At the other extreme, the ‘we’ may be narrowed to a smaller unit than the current four co-authors. In the sentence which follows by using the kind of presupposition noted above in the case of Ruesch and Bateson’s term which is spelled out in the cited source, here the co-authors are joining one of them in using a term which he has coined in a nearly synchronous paper. Perhaps the most significant constraint on audience response to public discourse can be located at what we have called the sites of engagement. (Scollon 1997a)

This latter case, while perhaps somewhat odd seeming, reflects what is the case throughout ‘Blurred genres’ through the indirect quotation and citation we observed above. The authors are positioning themselves together with the reader, the non-specific ‘one’, the researchers cited, including the authors of this chapter and the largely silent academic colleagues who act as reviewers and editors as one community of practice, as members of one discourse. It is an ongoing academic conversation which maintains a dialogic and polyphonic thread from the earliest references cited (1951) through the current chapter (‘Blurred genres’) on into the papers which are still to be published (in press). The 100 some references outline the rough dimensions of this community and its currently vocal participants. The authors position themselves as within this conversation, both following others and expecting to be followed upon.

Intertextuality across communities of practice

Stance within the community of practice I said at the outset that academics display great concern with intertextuality and discourse representation. This is displayed in the large number of manuals and guidelines or policies and penalties regarding inappropriate citation and plagiarization. The University of California Press’s ‘Credits, Permissions, Releases, and Consents: Guidelines for Authors’ (dated 3/11/93, p. 1), for example, says If you use any work by another person in any way, good scholarly and publishing practice requires that you give proper credit. The University of Northern British Columbia comments that You should sound like a serious student who is entering the ongoing conversation among academics (p. 2). The key to such materials, interestingly enough, is not a question of text ownership but one of the character of the author. One finds phrases such as — ‘good scholarly practice’, ‘ethics requires you’, ‘entering the ongoing conversation among academics’ — throughout this literature. It is a question of showing that you have the right to be considered a proper member of a community of practice through showing that you control the appropriate forms of discourse representation. The highly authoritative and influential Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Fourth Edition, 1994) takes the same position. Authors are responsible for all information in a reference. Accurately prepared references help establish your credibility as a careful researcher (p. 175). Naturally, in a discourse which is predicated on establishing and positioning its members, when members are being frank we see a somewhat seamier side to this positioning. I once asked a colleague by email about a term I had used which I had appropriated from his writing — of course with proper citation. I had asked if the term was original with him or if he himself had got it elsewhere. His response, which for obvious reasons I will not give an attribution, was: I think I stole the term from a guy at N. Carolina, I forget his name, who wrote an essay years ago called ‘xxx.’ I liked the essay very much, but I met the author and thought he was a jerk so now I’ve suppressed his name. In this concept of academic discourse there are two parts. In the first place, the academic must show him/herself to be a legitimated member of the discourse who can show that legitimated participation (Lave and Wenger 1991) through proper discourse representation. But one must also make a unique conversational contribution and contrive to have that participation ratified by colleagues through their return citations. The APA manual in another place makes this point.

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Like a wall that is built one brick at a time, the peer-reviewed literature in a field is built by single contributions that together represent the accumulated knowledge of a field. Each contribution must fill a place that before was empty, and each contribution must be sturdy enough to bear the weight of contribution to come (p. 291). Setting aside the tediously positivistic metaphor which positions knowledge as the production of a brick wall rather than a Bakhtinian dialogue, it is clear that the concern here is with the careful maintenance of a smoothly functioning discourse within a community of practice. Academic papers are to speak intertextually to each other within a single discourse which is a discourse about something quite outside of that discourse. The linguistic means of discourse representation are taken as primary tools in the production of this discourse.

Journalistic practice In my discussion of academic discourse above I used a single illustrative text, our ‘Blurred genres’ paper, as a way of outlining practices for discourse representation in academic discourse. Now as I turn to journalistic discourse I will rely principally upon two sources. The first of these is my own extended study of news discourse (Scollon 1998a). In addition, for closer comparison I will use two stories which were collected as part of that research and which have also been analyzed from a somewhat different point of view by Yung and S. Scollon (1997). The first of these stories was of the murder of a class of school children in Dunblane, Scotland on 13 March 1996. This story was carried immediately by all of the newspapers and television stations in Hong Kong in both Chinese and English, including, of course, international sources such as CBS Evening News, CNN, and the Asian Wall Street Journal. At the same time, there was another story of a young girl murdered in Hong Kong. While this story did not receive international attention, it did play in all of the local media in both languages. The first of these I will refer to as the Scotland story and the second as the Hong Kong story. By using these two stories we have been able to make comparisons which take into consideration either the local or foreign origin of the stories and reproduction in the original language as compared to translations into a second language. Furthermore, as the stories are very similar in story type, in community reaction to the tragedies, and in journalistic stance toward the events, they provide a somewhat controlled basis for crossmedia and cross-linguistic comparison. Journalistic discourse, like academic discourse, is not uniform. There are important differences between print and broadcast journalism, even within the narrow range of study we have chosen of discourse representation as I have indicated above (Scollon 1998a). There are also major differences across genres from spot news stories such as the one I am focusing on here to features or editorials. Nevertheless,

Intertextuality across communities of practice

I will argue here that, on the whole, discourse representation is accomplished in journalism within a much smaller range of linguistic means than in academic discourse. At the same time there is a much higher level of citation and quotation. This latter observation has to do with a significantly different production format and reflects a very different stance of the writer/author toward both the texts themselves and the other discourses which intersect within the news story.

Discourse representation To take up the question of discourse representation first, in both the Scotland and the Hong Kong stories there is a much more complex set of intersecting discourses. The primary discourse, the discourse of journalism, is present, of course, in such features as style, layout, and the ‘inverted pyramid’ story structure of producing the most ‘newsworthy’ (Bell 1991) points first. We also see strong representation of other discourses such as education in the references to schools, teachers, classroom layouts or public or government policy in comments by newsmakers on gun control or other measures of public safety. These multiple discourses are not surprising, of course, but it does point out from the outset that, unlike academic discourse which produces an hermetically sealed discourse among academics and at a distance from the complex discourses of daily life, journalistic discourse situates itself squarely at the center of such public discourses. Only in such genres as the editorial or in some features does the journalist sometimes step back from this polyphonal chorus of discourses to produce the more unitary style and tone of the academic paper, and these genres are clearly set apart typographically as not being the prototypical journalistic story (Scollon 1998a). If we turn to citation and quotation, the flesh and bone of discourse representation, we find that there is a very high number of citations as well as of quotations. Table 2 gives these citation and quotation numbers for the Scotland and the Hong Kong story in both print and television versions and in both English and Chinese versions. In addition, Table 2 gives the corresponding figures for academic discourse given above. Table 2 shows that there are many more citations per 100 words in all of these journalistic sources than in any of the academic sources, though, of course there is considerable variation from medium to medium or source to source. Quotations give a somewhat muddier picture but suggest that Yung’s (1995) earlier finding that direct quotation is much rarer in Chinese than in English is supported. The exceptional Ming Pao figure of 0.7 quotations per 100 words might receive partial explanation by the fact that this is a story translated rather directly from an English language news agency source and may represent English discursive practice more than stories which originate in Chinese. Citation and quotation in journalistic discourse are accomplished through fairly straightforward practices of using verb of reporting. In these two stories, perhaps because of the nature of the tragic events, there is very little characterization of the

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Table 2. Citations and direct quotations in academic and journalism writing Source

Academic writing Journal of American History Publication of the Modern Language Association Journal of Counseling Psychology ‘Blurred genres . . .’ Applied Linguistics English language news media South China Morning Post (Scotland story, English) TVB Pearl (Scotland story, English) South China Morning Post (Hong Kong story, English) TVB Pearl (Hong Kong story, English) Chinese language news media Ming Pao (Scotland story, Chinese) ATV (Scotland story, Chinese) Ming Pao (Hong Kong story, Chinese) Cable News (Hong Kong story, Chinese)

Citations per 100

Quotations (or actualities) per 100

1.5 0.5 1.5 1.7

0.8 0.3 0.1 0

3.0 5.0 3.8 6.7

2.4 1.0 0.8 0*

5.3 3.3 2.1 2.1

0.7 0* 0 0

*Actualities in these stories would require voiceover as they are not spoken in the language of the broadcast

type found by Yung and S. Scollon (1997). Verbs of reporting hug close to the objective ground of ‘said’, ‘observed’, ‘told’, ‘described’. Perhaps most noticeable in these stories is an almost complete absence of any other of the forms of discourse representation. Of the 17 or so different means by which intertextuality may be produced, verbs of reporting, punctuation and hedging account for nearly all of the many citations in these stories. While clearly one would expect greater complexity in, perhaps, news stories in the political arena, the fairly broad-stroke simplicity of discourse representation in these stories is striking compared to academic discourse. We find in this journalistic discourse a much higher level of citation accomplished through a significantly limited sub-set of linguistic means.

Production formats Journalistic discourse is a discourse of many voices. To the extent my data reflect this broad discourse, I would argue that the intertextuality of journalistic discourse is considerably greater than that of academic discourse. More important than this increased number of voices represented in journalistic texts is the relationship between those many voices and the voices of the journalist. I argued in respect to academic discourse that it was a discourse among the many texts cited, a conversation in which the authors of the principal text positioned themselves as active participants in this discourse. I argued that that discourse was hermetically sealed off from

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both the discourses of the subjects of analysis and from the broad sociocultural discourses of the society in which the academic conversation is taking place. Now I would argue that for journalists there are two principal discourses, the discourse of public life — that of the newsmakers whether they are politicians and political figures, murderers, victims, or stunned onlookers — and the discourse of journalism which is carried out among journalists as orchestrators or presenters of that other public discourse. As I have argued elsewhere (Scollon 1998a) the primary social interactions out of which journalistic discourse is constructed are interactions among journalists, whether these be the reporters, sub-editors, and editors of print journalism or the reporters, presenters, and producers of broadcast journalism. The raw material out of which they craft this discourse are the activities and utterances of the public. The stance they take in producing this discourse-for-display, this show of public utterances is one of distanced and objective transmission. However significantly they may shape, guide, and color this public discourse — and they would no doubt quit their work if they felt they were unable to do this — the stance journalists take is one of neutral transmission from the public to the public. Journalists as journalists position themselves outside of this public discourse as its moderators, its facilitators, its critics, but not as participants within it. One sees this contrast with academic discourse most clearly in the pronominal stances taken. We find no ‘we’ uttered by the journalist in regard to the reported discourse. To be sure when the television presenter is winding up the broadcast of the evening news he or she might say, ‘From us, good evening,’ or ‘Join us tomorrow at the same time.’ What we do not find is the participatory ‘we’ in relationship to the events or utterances of the news stories themselves. What we do not find is utterances which position the journalist within the public discourse. The following sentence taken from ‘Blurred genres’ but modified with italics seems a rather unlikely sentence to be found in a television news broadcast. We now turn to the issue of the practices of our own city government. In our analysis . . . What we find are sentences such as this: Today a spokesman for the city government said that . . . If a criticism of this spokesman’s comments were put forward, we can be sure that it would be put forward in the voice of another public figure, not in the voice of the journalist. To be sure, journalists may also take up roles as public commentators in editorials, in panel discussions, and the like. I would argue that these instances, however, are not journalists working as journalists but working within the broader public discourse. To use Goffman’s framework, we could say that journalists position themselves not as the unitary author-animator-principals of their own utterances but largely as the animators of the utterances of public figures to whom authorship and principalship are gladly delegated.

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Stance within the community of practice The view that journalists position themselves outside of the public discourse upon which they report as its orchestrators and critics is substantiated by comments made by journalists. For example, Murry Fromson who formerly worked for CBS News and for the Associated Press and then later as Dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Journalism has commented that the journalist’s major obligation is to be a ‘voice to the voiceless’ (Fromson 1994). That is, the journalist stands between the common reader and the government as one who reports to the people on the doings of public figures and who reports to public figures the wishes of the people. Academics are greatly concerned with citation and accurate quotation and attribution. As I have argued above, this is seen by academics as a matter of character, a matter of demonstrating oneself to be a worthy and legitimate member of the discourse of academics. Journalists are also concerned with citation and attribution, but in their case the concern is primarily with avoiding responsibility which could lead to libel suits. At the same time, journalists are concerned with the quality of the story as story they are telling. One journalist I interviewed was asked how he and other journalists look upon quotation. He said: There are two views: One is you should quote exactly and the other is you should sharpen it up to make a better story. I think most of us feel you should sharpen up your quotes. Politicians don’t often say anything very memorable.² Of course, as analysts of journalistic practice have noted (Evans 1976; Zhang 1988; Bell 1991; Scollon 1998a) very little text appears in either print or television news which has not been multiply authored and re-authored with little or no attribution along the way until the final byline is attached. Within the multiple authoring, editing, and revising practices of this community of practice it should come as no surprise that the texts which appear between quotation marks bear only a distant resemblance to something literally said by some newsmaker. What is important for this study is that the stance within the community of practice is that this is normal, acceptable practice. The purpose of citation and of quotation is to set some distance between the journalist and the texts he or she produces, not as in academic practice to use discourse representation to construct a legitimate participant in the discourse.

Advertising Practice If we academics seek to position ourselves as legitimate participants within academic discourse and journalists seek to position themselves outside of public discourse as orchestrators, presenters, critics or remote and objective animators of

Intertextuality across communities of practice

that discourse, advertisers seek to disappear from the discourses they produce altogether. While discourse representation in academic discourse is used to produce complex and subtle positionings among academics, including the author as one of them, and discourse representation is used by journalists to set a distance or boundary between themselves and the newsmakers they cite, discourse representation in advertising is used to position their clients and their products in relationship to potential consumers. Advertisers themselves work behind the scenes as invisible animators of the discourses of others. In this their role as authors of texts becomes perhaps even more complex than that of authors of works of fiction combining as it does not only aspects of ghost writing but also of theatre as well. Any attempt to work out how discourse representation is accomplished in advertising is frustrated by the fact that rarely are there any real speakers or writers communicating to any real audience. That is to say, the discourse representation of advertising is among fictional players in constructed scenarios, not between the producers of the discourse and those players. While this fictionalized discourse is extremely rich in internal forms of discourse representation, with one extremely rare exception in my data, the advertiser does not write,‘You should buy X because I think it is a good product.’ As a result, since my concern here is with how the producers of a discourse represent themselves to and among the other participants of the discourse, I will have to abandon the parallelism of plan here and move directly to the question of production formats which is where we can see a bit of the play among producers, fictionalized actors, and audience. Within that I will discuss eight somewhat distinctive production formats I have found in advertising. As part of that discussion I will comment on questions of the means of discourse representation and how it functions within those seven scenarios. Then, finally, I will turn to the stance advertisers themselves take in respect to discourse representation in their work.

Eight production formats Heuristically I have grouped various print advertisements and television commercials into eight somewhat distinct categories based on the production format. The first two of these construct the prototypical sender-receiver model of communication. For example, in a television commercial for Emirates Airlines we have this text spoken by a narrator as we see various shots of exteriors and then interiors of airplanes: We at Emirates have already specified and ordered a new generation of airliners for use in the next century. But even today every seat of our Airbus aircraft has a personal video system. And you enjoy levels of comfort among the highest in the sky. Today we fly the world. Tomorrow, who knows? Emirates. (TVB Pearl, June 16, 1995) This commercial constructs the client (the advertising company’s client, Emirates) as the speaker of this utterance through such phrases as ‘we at Emirates’ and the pro-

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nouns ‘our’ and ‘we’. It constructs the viewer and presumed consumer as the receiver with the use of ‘you’.³ This construction is further supported with low-angle, closeup shots of flight attendants servicing passengers who it suggests are sitting next to or close to the viewer. There is little problematical about this commercial; this format is quite common in both video and print advertising. We must remember for our analysis that all of this is enacted. The producers of this text (in the broad sense to include the images and sounds as well) are not Emirates, but their advertising company. The advertiser is entirely outside of this discourse and invisible in it. The principal of this utterance is Emirates, the product agency and this corporate entity is fictionalized as author and animator as well. I do not want to dwell on this single and rather unremarkable advertisment, but it might be worth pointing out that intertextuality here, as in much advertising, is perplexingly complex. While this is staged as a simple sender-receiver text, there are other things going on. There is a women’s chorus humming in the background. Whose voices are these? What do they represent? The first pan shot of the airplane is outside and in front of it. Whose point of view is this? The shot is all blue tinted. On screen are other bits of texts such as the Emirates logo and some Arabic text. Perhaps this is the name of the airline? There is also text which cites Executive Travel Magazine as saying ‘Airline of the Year 1994’. There are many and complex voicings surrounding the otherwise apparently simple and direct, but fictionalized senderreceiver model displayed in this commercial. As in many forms of art, there is much to be said for confusion and ambiguity. I simply want to recall in this analysis and in what follows that I am temporarily setting aside these very complex ambiguities in my interest in focusing on the central production format. A second type of sender-receiver production format is in some ways much simpler. This is the model used in direct marketing. While the sender is the equally fictionalized entity of the product client, the receiver is more clearly the viewing (or reading or listening) audience. There are telephone numbers to call right then at the time of viewing or coupons to clip out, fill in and mail. These potential receiver actions concretize the viewing/reading audience in a way that does not happen in the Emirates example. In that example one is ambiguously a person seated next to a child watching an individual TV and a person watching the whole commercial on TV at home far from the roar of airplane engines. If we return now to the first type, the sender-receiver format, to raise the question of discourse representation, or more specifically of citation and quotation, we can see that this is largely done by implication. One is normally left to assume that whatever voice is speaking the ‘we’ is the corporate entity represented through the logos and other identifications in the advertisement. In some cases, however, a particular person is identified as the source of a direct quotation. In a large fold-out advertisement for SAAB which appeared in Time (October 27, 1997) we see a full-page photograph of a very severe-looking man, perhaps a Scandinavian. Next to the photo in fine print is: ‘Einar Hareide, Head of Design’. The text

Intertextuality across communities of practice

says [without quotation marks], ‘Our heritage with aircraft led us to a very simple principle:’ We are held in abeyance for the clause to follow the colon until we open up the page. Meanwhile there is every reason to believe that we are to understand that these are the words of the Head of Design at SAAB. Opening the page we find the words in large print (the same size as the ‘Our heritage’ phrase above, and also without quotation marks), ‘There should be no forces outside your control.’ No question about it, we are to take the sentence Our heritage with aircraft led us to a very simple principle: There should be no forces outside your control. as having been spoken by Einar Hareide, Head of Design. The problem with this interpretation is that it is quickly undermined by a page full of fine print which extols the virtues of the SAAB in fairly typical advertising copy-ese. Building a performance aircraft is all about the balance of opposing forces. Velocity competes with inertia. Thrust with gravity. Heat with cold. The same applies to a performance car. A suspension system comfortable enough to iron out the roughest road must have a chassis firm enough to cradle you around the corners. An engine powerful enough to produce exhilarating mid-range torque must have the handling to match. A vehicle that delivers exceptional performance must have a safety system that gives you the confidence to use it. This thinking has led to a unique synthesis of power and restraint, of tradition and innovation, of strength and agility: the new Saab 9–5. A car that perfectly demonstrates our key belief: There should be no forces outside your control. This is text which it is impossible, or at least difficult, to consider the Head of Design to have written or spoken, yet the final sentence is the one which uppage has been attributed to him. What I mean to point out here is simply that even where discourse representation is used in advertising in fairly common, straightforward ways in which a particular person is said to have said something and those words are given, in advertising these same words may then again be quickly subsumed within another framing which does not attribute them in the same way. Rarely are quotation marks used to signal to the reader who is speaking the utterace. One exception is an advertisement in People (June 16, 1997: 76). We see a man in dress shirt, slacks, hard hat — an engineer — walking on a bridge, looking away from the camera. This is a ‘candid’ shot. The text under the words ‘The Manhattan® Man’ says [Double quotes (“) in the original],

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“As an engineer, I want each project to be designed for strength and simplicity — on budget without sacrifice of quality. I try to inspire my son to look for the same inherent values, even when we shop. He does pretty well. He bought me these Manhattan clothes for Father’s Day.” Dan Cardwell Here the text is attributed to Dan Cardwell as in a kind of letter or affidavit with a signature. He is not speaking to us as the Swedish designer was. In one other case a considerable amount of polyvocality is built into the ad. A MIDOL ad in People (June 16, 1997: 112) has a photo of a woman speaking directly into the camera saying [her words in double quotation marks], “He hands me Advil for my period. Nice try, honey, but it’s not enough.” The text is set in a typewriter font (Courier) blown up so that imperfections can be seen. The woman is only identified by implication as the woman in the photo. Below at the bottom of the layout are the words, Why take less than MIDOL? These are also set in exaggeratedly magnified Courier font like the quote above, but not set in quotation marks. Here are three voices. (1) The woman who is saying ‘He hands me Advil . . .’, (2) The same woman quoting herself saying, ‘Nice try honey . . .’, and (3) the unidentified voice, ‘Why take less . . . ?’ Like the SAAB ad, there’s a blurring of the voices as the directly quoted voice of the person in the ad is slurred into the voice of the advertising copywriter. The other production formats can be introduced fairly quickly. The next two I will consider are micro-dramas which are played out for the spectating audience of consumers. One version of this simply shows characters on the screen engaged in some activity for which the product of the advertiser’s client is an essential ingredient. In these cases the first person and second person pronouns refer to characters in the drama, not to the corporate sponsor and the viewer. As viewers or readers we are simple spectators of what others are saying and doing. In Hong Kong in recent years the most notoriously objectionable of these was the Carlsberg ‘Legs’ commercial. We see a small group of men [M1, M2, etc.] drinking Carlsberg while they say: [M1]The first thing that men look at in a woman are their legs. [M2] I, you know, not the perfect legs, not the perfect girl, just nice. [MC3] Oh yeah, the question can she move in heels? [MC4]They, they, they carry themselves, I mean the way one leg just glides past the other, and it’s . . . [MC5] gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous [MC6] the way she struts down the street and your eyes just follow all the way to the end just, rufff. [MC7]xxx Oh sure, very exciting.. [MC8]The way I feel about a Carlsberg is the way I

Intertextuality across communities of practice

feel about a great pair of legs. It’s just the feel of it. There’s nothing else like it. Why? Just because. [MC9] Have you ever seen a woman put on panty hose? (ATV World, June 16, 1995) The product is brought into this discourse as just one of the things one of the characters feels himself obliged to express himself about. Carlsberg, the sponsor, does not intrude as a participant nor do any of the participants address anyone but each other. As a twist on these micro-dramas is what we might call the Brechtian microdrama which is much like the one just illustrated except that one or more of the characters speaks directly to the viewer/reader. A Revlon Colorstay commercial illustrates this [FC means ‘female character’ FN means ‘female narrator’]: [FC] Now just because you wear lipstick doesn’t mean he has to. [FN] Revlon creates Colorstay. Color that stays on your lips all day. [FC] and won’t kiss off on him. [FN] Revlon Colorstay Lipcolor. [Male growl] REVLON (TVB Pearl, June 16, 1995). There is no identification of the characters as ‘we at Revlon’ as there was in the Emirates commercial above. These are characters in a drama who are running up a beach together. In the first sentence the ‘he’ is ambiguous but most likely should be taken as the significant ‘he’ in the life of the ‘you’ in the audience to whom the FC is speaking. In the second case, however, the ‘him’ is a man in the drama whom the FC kisses just before she says this. This Brechtian mixing of onstage characters and audiences is surprisingly common in television advertising. A fifth type of production format we might call the MC (Master of Ceremonies) or Presenter format. In these commercials and advertisements a product, or more often just a product name, is displayed in some (normally) elegant frame. The presenter voice of the narrator or brand-name labelling in the printed advertisement is usually unaccompanied by any other text. No ‘we’ is identified, nor is any ‘you’. A commercial for Cross pens is typical. While a pen enters the picture like a space ship of Star Trek and slowly crosses while revolving, the narrator says: Presenting the Cross Townsend Collection. Art deco elegance that goes beyond time, beyond art, beyond words (TVB Pearl, June 16, 1995). Other on-screen text says: CROSS Since 1846 Cross Goes Beyond Words This type of advertisement or commercial seems most frequently found in brand recognition advertisments, especially for fashions. The sixth production format we could call the ‘one world’ format. These commercials and advertisements beg a joint principalship as in the following for Philips

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which appeared in Eagle the inflight magazine of China Southwest Airlines in China (Vol 6 (38), 1997). Let’s make things better. [Same slogan in Chinese] The accompanying artwork shows a cartoon of a man walking through a swamp of 5¼″ diskettes as if lost. In advertisements and commercials such as this the ‘us’ is a world-wide ‘us’. We are invited to join Philips in general world improvement, though it is not immediately obvious to me how buying the package of diskettes pictured at the bottom of the page might help to ‘make things better’. This format seems to be used largely for brand-recognition rather than for the advertising of specific products. Even more general a format than the ‘One World’ format in which everyone is invited to join in the discourse of the advertisement is the seventh format, the ‘Information’ format. A DuPont advertisement for Hytrel ® , a ‘brand of thermoplastic elastomer’ appeared in Harper’s (Vol 295 (1769), p. 5). There is a photograph of a large bare foot rising up on the ball of the foot. The text below the foot is bent down as if under pressure from the foot. There is a photo of athletic shoes below. The text reads: The feet of a six foot tall, two hundred pound runner will absorb roughtly 352,000 pounds of stress per mile. Unless DuPont Hytrel® helps absorb it first. Here there are no participant structures marked at all. Neither the speaking/writing voice is directly identified nor the intended receiver.At the same time it is not a drama being played out for us to observe. It is presented as information, pure and simple. In this format all production format roles have been erased or backgrounded. Finally, the eighth format is the one which I suggested above would be impossible. In this format the advertiser comes out from behind the screen and directly tells us to patronize their client. Perhaps it is useful to know that the only advertisement of this kind I have seen was for the Jindi Hotel in Chengdu, Sichuan, China and appeared in Eagle, China Southwest Airlines in China (Vol 6(38), 1997: 46). There is a great deal of text and many photos. Most of the text is in Chinese but is in the same production format as this shorter piece in English: JINDI Hotel, a 2-star hotel lies in the center of Chengdu. She provides you with convenient funiture [sic], best service and workable price. MAIN SERVICE SPECIFICATION: 220 Rooms, traditional Sichuan dish restaurant, dancing hall, Karaoke hall, beauty salon, business center, conference center, IDD, Room electric code safe. NO HESITATE STAY IN JINDI HOTEL! EVERYTHING GOES AS YOU WANT! The ‘you’ addressed is the reader/consumer, the person who is traveling on this plane toward Chengdu and would stay in the hotel. The hotel itself is referred to in the

‘We/us’; principal of utterance implicit Principal as presenter of drama; ‘I — you’ within drama (users of product)

invisible author and animator

invisible real author and animator

invisible as author and animator

presenter or MC of display; principal, author and animator

identified w/o commitment of role

invisible as author and animator

visible as author, animator, and principal (on behalf of product)

Sender-receiver; direct marketing

Drama-spectator

Brechtian drama

MC (presenter)

One world

Information

Spokesperson

invisible; implied spectator, unaddressed

No identification of identities; principal suggested by logo and slogan

‘You’ addressed by advertiser

Included in ‘we’

Joint principalship begged; ‘Let’s all’; ‘we’ includes everyone in society

Brechtian/Pirandello spectator; addressed from stage

Spectator of drama

Spectator of display

‘we/us’ is advertiser; ‘she/ they’ is product

Emirates (TV); SAAB (Time)

Typifying example

JINDI Hotel (Eagle, Chinese)

Dupont (Harper’s)

Philips (Eagle, Chinese)

Cross Pens (TV); Hermès; Cartier; Ermenegildo Zegna; Alfred Dunhill

Revlon (TV)

Carlsberg (TV)

‘You’; implied receiver of Economist (TV) utterance implicit; contact telephone number given

‘You’; implied receiver of utterance

Consumer

Display for observation, admiration

Principal as presenter of drama; ‘I’ speaks to ‘audience’

‘We/us’; principal of utterance explicit

invisible author and animator

Sender-receiver

Product agency

Advertiser

Type

Table 3. Production format roles in advertising and commercials

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third person,‘she’. I note that this is not the ‘we’ of the first or second formats in which the client is fictionalized as speaking to the audience. The voice we hear is that of the advertiser telling us about JINDI Hotel. Table 3 summarizes these eight production formats indicating the participation roles of the advertiser, the product agency or client, and the consumer along with giving a typifying example as cited above. While I have not looked closely at the specific practices of discourse representation in these advertisements, it should be clear that the production formats and stances of the producers of the texts, the advertisers, are radically different from those in academic and journalistic discourse. The advertiser in all cases but the spokesperson advertisement found in China stands invisible behind the discourses which are presented in the texts. The highly complex forms of intertextuality, including intertextuality across texts and images, are displayed as the only discourses of relevance. The advertiser himself or herself neither enters into the discourse as an engaged participant as in academic discourse nor stands to one side as orchestrator or critic as in journalistic discourse. The advertiser in advertising is the ‘Third Man’, the crucial but elusive figure behind the discourse.

Stance within the community of practice Given the invisibility of the advertiser in the discourses of advertising⁴ it should not be surprising that advertisers are highly casual about the appropriation of ideas in their work. One advertiser I interviewed said the following [author’s fieldnotes]: Ideas, treatments, concepts, copy, etc. These are fair game. Nobody thinks about who will own an idea when ideas are being developed. It simply isn’t an issue. Whoever pays for the idea owns it, so in most cases that’s the client, or end user. I can be a lowly copy cub making minimum wage, come up with a brilliant piece of copy or theme or design or slogan or whatever, that the client uses for twenty years and makes the client a bazillion bucks and the creator gets zippo. And if it’s really a great idea everybody else in the world will steal it, and there’s nothing that can be done. Nobody copyrights ads. Nobody thinks about it. At the same time he did add a caveat to this statement. Specific art or photography, etc. This stuff is normally sold for a one time use, and rights remain with the creator. As to why advertisers are so little concerned with ownership and citation, this advertiser said Anyway, ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is a whole other thing. While the academic is concerned with placing himself or herself within academic discourse as a legitimated participant and so uses careful practices of discourse

Intertextuality across communities of practice

representation to accomplish that positioning, the advertiser is, according to my sources, only concerned with selling the advertising campaign to the client. One source went so far as to say that he never bothered to consult his own company’s marketing research about the effectiveness of campaigns. The reason he gave was that the client bought his advertising on the basis of the attractiveness of the campaign, not on the basis of its effectiveness, and that is how he sold his work.

From discourse representation to practice The linguistic form of quotation within a language may be relatively uniform — a verb of saying, a comma, an opening quotation mark, the quoted text, ending punctuation, ending closing quotation mark. James Joyce may introduce the use of a dash to open a quotation in his Portrait and a Roddy Doyle may continue that tradition in Anglo-Irish writing in his The Van. Still, at the level of linguistic form, quotation remains fairly stable throughout contemporary English.⁵ As I have tried to argue here, however, this stability in form may easily disguise a wide range of functional variability. This variability is of two kinds. The first kind of variability is that of the broader range of discourse representation. Text may be appropriated for use in other texts with a much wider range of linguistic means than quotation, whether direct quotation or indirect quotation. As I have argued above, within the three communities of practice I have studied academics use a much wider range of means of discourse representation than journalists. Academics use direct quotation (though more sparingly than journalists), indirect quotation, presupposition, negation, metaphor, assertion and most of the rest of the panoply of forms of discourse representation. Journalists on the other hand, though quoting much more frequently than academics, stick within the fairly narrow range of direct and indirect quotation with little use of other forms. Advertisers work within a world of fictional and fictionalized discourse in which the entire repertoire of discourse representation may be used — even going beyond the list above to include representation through images and sound — but at the same time very rarely introduce actual utterances of non-fictional participants into their work. The second kind of variability in discourse representation is to me more significant. Across these three communities of practice we have seen that discourse representation carries a significantly different functional load. Through discourse representation in these three groups the writers of texts position themselves in relationship to the texts they appropriate, and in relationship to their audiences very differently. Academics position themselves within a discourse of academics as participating members. Journalists position themselves outside of the discourse of public figures as the orchestrators or critics of that discourse who are simply transmitting it to a reading public, not as participants within it. Advertisers retreat still further from the discourses they present and set up a set of discourses which range from senderreceiver conversations between their clients and their consumers to staging dramas

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for the consumer to simply making information available to a public. I have developed the argument elsewhere (Scollon 1998a) that these three positionings are keyed to certain economic transactions which govern these communities of practice. It is a rare academic who gains more than the most minimal royalties from academic publication. Academic writing is not independent of an academic career, however. It is the kingpin of an academic career to join into the discourse of academics. One is advanced through the career on the evidence of legitimated membership in the community of practice. This legitimation is accomplished largely through the means of citation and attribution of other scholars in one’s texts and through the citation of one’s work by others. As one builds an opus of academic works, that résumé is reviewed at each stage as the primary evidence of worthiness for advancement. Journalists are not paid by the purchase of newspapers and broadcast television in many places is free for the price of a television set which is sold to the consumer by someone other than the journalist.⁶ It is the advertiser who pays the journalist’s salary through the purchase of advertising space in newspapers, magazines, and the broadcast media. From the first newspapers this essential commercial element has been part of the economic structure of the news media (Evans 1976; Scollon 1998a). Discourse representation in the news media puts journalists in this way at an even greater distance from the fundamental economic transactions paying their way than the advertisers who make it possible. If journalists virtually never enter into the public discourse of the newsmakers they cite, they even more rarely show themselves to be dependent upon the advertising discourse which is what sells their newspapers and their television broadcasts. They position themselves as distant and aloof from either the public discourse of politicians or the tawdry business of collecting money and paying salaries or per-word-count freelance story fees. Like journalists, advertisers remain behind the scenes, but unlike journalists keep themselves invisible in the discourses they produce. It is their work to produce Table 4. Positionings across communities of practice Community of practice

Text producers (authors)

Sources of intertextuality

Audience

Economic transaction

Academic

Scholars

Scholars

Scholars

Scholar advances in profession through degree of legitimacy as member

Journalism

Journalists

Newsmaking Ordinary public, politicians public

Newspapers and television sell audience or readers to advertisers

Advertising

Advertisers

Largely fictional

Advertisers sell campaign to client

Consumers

Intertextuality across communities of practice

consumers to sell to their clients. Table 4 summarizes these differences in position. Across these three discourses I would argue it is impossible to maintain any illusion that discourse representation functions in any uniform way. The positionings accomplished through discourse representation must be analyzed in light of these radically different positions of the authors in these different communities of practice. Here I have examined only three broad communities of practice, academics, journalism, and advertising. I have suggested above, of course, that we would find interesting differences between historians and psychologists and, no doubt, between linguists and chemists. I cannot guess how many different communities of practice one might ultimately discover within which there would be found broadly differing practices of discourse representation. My goal has been to try to establish simply that there are such different practices. The academic says: This is what others say. This is what the data say. This is what I say; you should believe me because I am one of us. The journalist says: This is what the newsmaker says and isn’t it outrageous? Certainly I didn’t or wouldn’t say that. The advertiser says: This is what my client says and you should believe it and act on it. Discourse representation across these three communities of practice is used to establish different positions and sets of relationship among authors, texts, and readers or viewers. Each community of practice relies upon different means of discourse representation — journalists rely heavily upon direct and indirect quotation; academics rely much less on direct quotation but much more heavily upon the more subtle forms such as presupposition, negation, and hedging; advertisers produce fictionalized set pieces in which the connection to actual prior texts is at best ambiguous. At the same time discourse representation is one of the primary means by which personal and textual positions in the sociocultural matrix of society are constructed. Discourse representation, then, is doubly constitutive of communities of practice.

Notes 1. This research has been supported in part by two grants from the University Grants Council (Hong Kong) ‘Changing Patterns of Genre and Identity in Hong Kong Public Discourse’ (Ron Scollon, Vijay Bhatia, David Li, and Vicki Yung), and ‘Plagiarization as Social Practice: Discourse Representation in Contemporary Hong Kong Chinese and English Public Discourse’ (Ron Scollon, Suzanne Scollon, and Vicki Yung), and by the Media, Information Technology, and Intercultural Communication Studies group of City University of Hong Kong. Our research assistants Beatrice Chan and Yang Xueyi have provided much support both in constructing the data and in thinking about it. Norman Fairclough, Wai King Tsang, David Li, Robert Davison, and Huhua Ouyang have given careful critical and insightful

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Ron Scollon readings. I wish to thank these colleagues for their discussion, insightful comments, and suggestions. The infelicities of thought and execution which remain are my own. 2. I have respected this journalist’s professional stance first by sharpening up his statement and secondly by presenting it here without attribution. 3. The ‘you’ is not always the immediate consumer as in the Differin acne gel advertisment (People, June 16, 1997: 16) which says, ‘There’s an acne medicine that can offer the kind of positive results your teen has been looking for.’ 4. I set aside for these purposes the professional discourse of advertising — the discourse which is carried on in the trade magazines. It might be argued that it would be that discourse which should correspond most closely to the practices of academics. That is likely to be the case. What is different, however, is that the advertiser’s professional discourse is carried on as it were behind the scenes of his or her displayed work. For the academic the professional discourse is the whole substance of the work. 5. Of course these conventions may not be strictly linguistic but also vary across publishing houses or across regional/national varieties such as in the UK and the US. 6. In the UK a licensing fee is paid.

References Bell, A. 1991. The Language of the News Media. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. 1993.“From discourse analysis to critical discourse analysis: The differential re-presentation of women and men speaking in written news.” In Techniques of Description: Spoken and Written Discourse, J. M. Sinclair, M. Hoey, and G. Fox (eds.), 196–208. London: Routledge. Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. 1994. “On reporting reporting: The representation of speech in factual and factional narratives.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, M. Coulthard (ed.), 293–308. London: Routledge. Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. and Coulthard, M. 1996. Texts and Practices: Readings in critical discourse. London: Routledge. Chaiklin, S. and Lave,J. 1993. Understanding Practice: Perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donne, J. 1971. The Complete English poems. A. J. Smith (ed.). London: Penguin Books. Evans, H. 1976. Editing and Design: A five-volume manual of english, typography and layout: Book five: Newspaper design. London: Heinemann. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold. Fromson, M. 1994. “The role of the international reporter.” Department of Journalism, Hong Kong Baptist College, Distinguished Visitor Lecture, 23 February 1994. Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hamilton, H. E. 1996. “Intratextuality, intertextuality, and the construction of identity as patient in Alzheimer’s disease.” Text 16(1): 61–90. Hamilton, H. E. 1998. “Reported speech and survivor identity in on-line bone marrow transplantation narratives.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 2(1): 53–67. Kachru, B. B. 1994. “Englishization and contact linguistics.” World Englishes 13(2): 135–154.

Intertextuality across communities of practice Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, C. S. D., Poon L.W.Y.W., Rogerson-Revell P.M, Scollon R., Scollon S., Yu S. K. B., and Yung K.Y.V. 1993. “Contrastive discourse in English and Cantonese news stories: A preliminary analysis of newspaper, radio, and television versions of the Lan Kwai Fong news story.” Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, Research Report, No. 29. Madigan, R., Johnson, S. and Linton, P. 1995. “The language of psychology: APA style as epistemology.” American Psychologist 50(6): 428–436. Mallon, T. 1989. Stolen Words: Forays into the origins and ravages of plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Publication manual of the American Psychological Association, 4th Edition. 1994. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Ruesch, J. and Bateson, G. 1968 [1951]. Communication: The social matrix of psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Scollon, R. 1994. “As a matter of fact: The changing ideology of authorship and responsibility in discourse.” World Englishes 13(1): 33–46. Scollon, R. 1995. “Plagiarism and ideology: Identity in intercultural discourse.” Language in Society 24(1): 1–28. Scollon, R. 1998a. Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction: A study of news discourse. New York: Longman. Scollon, R. 1998b. “Plagiarism and discourse representation as hegemonic social practice: Ownership and positioning.” Paper to be presented in the session ‘Globalism in Hong Kong Public Discourse: Post-modern ideology and local resistance’ at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropology Association, Philadelphia, 2–6 Dec. 1998. Scollon, R. 1998c. “Globalism and identity: Person, property and power in intertextuality.” Chairman’s comments for the session ‘Globalism in Hong Kong Public Discourse: Postmodern ideology and local resistance’ at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropology Association, Philadelphia 2–6 Dec. 1998. Scollon, R, Bhatia, V., Li, D., Yung, V. 1999. “Blurred genres and fuzzy identities in Hong Kong public discourse: Foundational ethnographic issues.” Applied Linguistics 20(1): 22–43. Scollon, R. and Yung, V. K.Y. 1996. “The social location of reading: Methodological issues in the study of reading as social practice.” Paper presented at the Centre for Language in Social Life, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 8 Oct. 1996. Scollon, S. and Yung, V. K.Y. 1997. “Framing, contextualization cues, and intertextuality in print and broadcast media: Discourse representation of one statement by Qian Qichen.” Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Cross-cultural Communication: East and West, Tempe, Arizona, March 1997. University of California Press. 1993. “Credits, Permissions, Releases, and Consents: guidelines for Authors” (3/11/93). University of Northern British Columbia. 1998. “Learning Skills Centre — How to lessen the chances of plagiarizing.” http://quarles.unbc.edu/lsc/rpplagia.html, 1–2. Wurff, W. van der 1997. “Reported discourse: A bibliography.” Department of English, University of Leiden. Unpublished manuscript; available at <wurff@rullet.leidenuniv.nl>. Yung, V. K.Y. 1995. “The presentation of voice in Chinese and English newspapers in Hong Kong.” Perspectives, Working Papers of the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong 8(1): 64–96.

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CHAPTER 10

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology A comparison of Japanese and American cooking classes¹ Patricia Mayes University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee

Introduction In this study, I investigate how native speakers of Japanese and English construct different social institutions through their linguistic practices in Japanese and American cooking classes. In comparing any two genres such as these, a preliminary question to be addressed is how similar the rhetorical situations are. Indeed, Miller (1984: 159) defines genres as “. . . typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” However, she also contends that rhetorical situations are socially constructed. As such, they may be expected to differ across cultures. In fact, Günthner and Knoblauch’s (1995: 8) definition of genre suggests this is true: They define genres as “historically and culturally specific, prepatterned and complex solutions to recurrent communicative problems.” (My emphasis.) Before analyzing the linguistic data, I will discuss the comparability of the Japanese and American cooking class genres.

What counts as similar? The question of comparability of genres across cultures is only discussed in passing in the genre literature. For example, Luckmann (1992) and Bergmann and Luckmann (1994) mention the theoretical possibility that there may be similar genres in different societies, but they do not provide any specific examples.² They suggest that while the repertoire of genres probably varies across cultures and historical periods, some genres are likely to be universal or at least quite similar across societies. . . . one may be sure that there are some basic problems to be resolved in all societies, that these problems will have a basic similarity one to another, and that therefore some kinds of communicative issues may be universal and, therefore, some kinds of similar genre-like solutions to communicative issues will be found everywhere. (Bergmann and Luckmann 1994: 23)

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This statement suggests that in order to consider two genres in two societies comparable, they must address the same communicative problem. However, this is not much different from saying that they must occur in similar situations. Like rhetorical situations, “communicative problems” are socially constructed. Miller’s (1984) notion of exigence sheds some light on this problem. She poses the question, “If rhetorical situation is not material and objective, but a social construct, or semiotic structure, how are we to understand exigence, which is at the core of situation” (Miller 1984: 157). She defines exigence as a mutually construed social motive through which actors’ personal intentions may be realized. Citing Schutz (1962), she suggests that actors come to understand exigence through experience with typified patterns. Through repetition, these patterns become objectified and are understood as situations, institutions, and ultimately reality itself. Miller goes on to suggest that the rationale for studying genres is to understand how a particular society objectifies its reality. I suggest that this is also the rationale for comparing two genres with a similar exigence across cultures. In the cooking classes, the exigence may be understood as conveying information about how to make specific recipes. This is true in both cultures and is evident from a number of regularly recurring patterns in the activities of the participants, which will be outlined below.

Comparable regular patterning in the Japanese and American cooking classes Of course, there were many regular patterns in the cooking classes in each culture, not all of which were comparable. I will return to some of the differences below. Here, I discuss only regularly reproduced patterns of action that may be taken as evidence that the cooking classes in the two cultures had a similar exigence. First, the locale of the classes in the two cultures was specific and regularized.³ This was true in terms of the time and space for each specific class. Thus, for example, the class called Vegetarian Cooking occurred at the same time in the same classroom, on a weekly basis. The use of space was regularized not only in terms of the concrete location (i.e., the classroom), but also in terms of the relative locations of participants in the classes. In general, in both the Japanese and American classes, the teacher stood in the front of the room at a large counter and demonstrated how to manipulate the recipe ingredients. In both the Japanese and American classrooms, there was a mirror above the counter so that the students could more easily see what the teacher was doing. There was also an oven, a stove, and a sink nearby. The students were generally seated at tables facing the counter. Second, there were specific social positions that were enacted by the same participants in every lesson of a particular class (i.e., teacher and student). Third, though there were differences in how class activities were organized in the two cultures, for the most part, both the Japanese and American classes were centered around the teacher’s demonstration of the recipes.

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Based on these regularly recurring patterns, the cooking class genres in the two cultures may be considered to have a similar exigence; in other words, they are solutions to similar communicative problems. My analysis shows how the participants in the classes in the two cultures construct different solutions to this common problem through their linguistic behavior. More specifically, differences in the formality of the language and the content of the talk in the Japanese and American classes reflect the different ways in which the participants in the two cultures construct and solve the problem of teaching/learning cooking.

The classes and participants The data for this study consist of 15–20-minute segments selected and transcribed from the demonstration portions of five Japanese and five American cooking lessons. The Japanese lessons were audiorecorded at a branch of the Better Home Cooking School in Tokyo. The classes were all designed for lay people rather than professional chefs. The American lessons were audiorecorded in Santa Barbara, California. They were offered by Adult Education which is operated by the State of California. As was the case in the Japanese classes, the American classes were designed for lay people rather than professional cooks. The recorded data are augmented with field notes based on observation.⁴ The Japanese classes met once a month and ran for a six-month period. I attended all six lessons for two of the classes (a class centered around cooking with rice and a basic cooking class), and my research assistant attended all six lessons of a third (basic cooking) class. The five transcribed segments are extracted from five different lessons taken from the three classes. Each of the three classes had a master teacher, an assistant teacher, and 35–45 students. All of the participants were women. Table 1 matches the Japanese transcripts with the class, lesson number, master teacher, and number of students. The American classes met once per week and ran for a period of six weeks. I attended all six of the lessons of three classes (a class for making international dishes, a bread making class, and a vegetarian cooking class). The five transcribed segments are extracted from five different lessons taken from the three classes. In each class, Table 1. Japanese cooking class, lesson, and participants Transcript

Class

Lesson

Teacher

Number of Students

Sushi Makizushi Daikon Guratan Torirebaa

Rice cooking Rice cooking Basic cooking 1 Basic cooking 1 Basic cooking 2

3 6 2 4 1

Suzuki Suzuki Kikuchi Kikuchi Nishima

45 45 43 43 35

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Patricia Mayes Table 2. American cooking class, lesson, and participants Transcript

Class

Lesson Teacher

Number of Students

Crab cakes Beef carbonade French bread Generic bread Vegetarian cooking

International cooking International cooking Bread making Bread making Vegetarian cooking

5 1 2 4 1

6 men; 8 women 6 men; 8 women 8 men; 13 women 8 men; 13 women 4 men; 21 women

Gary Gary Pam Pam Jean

there was a teacher and 14–25 students. There were both male and female students in the American classes, and two of the teachers were female and one was male. Table 2 matches the transcripts of the American classes with the class, lesson number, teacher, and number and sex of the students. There were some general similarities in the formats of the Japanese and American cooking lessons as well as a number of differences. I will describe these below.

Format of the Japanese classes All of the Japanese classes had a similar format.⁵ The duration of each lesson was three hours. At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher gave the first part of the demonstration, which usually lasted for approximately 45 minutes. After the initial demonstration, the students performed the portion of the procedure that had just been demonstrated in groups of five or six students. After they had finished, the teacher demonstrated the remaining procedures for that day’s recipes. This part of the demonstration usually came about 90 minutes into the class period and ranged from 15 to 30 minutes in duration. After the second part of the demonstration, the students completed the day’s cooking tasks in their groups. At the end of the class, they ate the food they had prepared with their groups.⁶

Format of the American classes The format of the American classes was more varied, but the following generalizations can be made: Like the Japanese lessons, the American lessons were three hours in duration. However, in contrast to the Japanese lessons, there was no time set aside for the students to prepare the recipes in class. The general plan was for the teachers to demonstrate the recipes (sometimes with the help of one or more students) as they were cooking a meal for the entire class. At the end of the class period, the students (and teacher) ate the food that had been prepared together. The variation within the American classes was due to differences in the teaching styles of the instructors. For example, some instructors preferred longer demonstrations than others; thus the length of the demonstrations varied from 20 minutes to two hours. Jean’s lessons were the most varied. Sometimes she gave a short

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology

20-minute demonstration of particularly noteworthy techniques at the beginning of class. At other times, she did not give any demonstration at all unless a student asked a question. In this case, she would use the question as a cue to demonstrate a confusing part of the recipe. From an observer’s point of view, her class seemed disorganized and rather haphazard. The other two teachers gave more lengthy, orderly demonstrations.

Linguistic regularities The participants in the Japanese and American cooking classes constructed the common exigence of the cooking class differently through their interaction. Some of the different patterns of interaction are reflected in linguistic regularities. Though there are many linguistic regularities in the data, here I will focus on differences in the formality of the language and the content of the talk. The Japanese teachers used formal language, and they talked only about task-oriented content. On the other hand, the participants in the American classes used comparatively informal language, and in addition to task-oriented talk, the teachers told personal stories, made jokes, and gossiped about other cooking teachers. The students also joined in on these activities.

Formal/informal style In order to discuss the issue of formal/informal language, I use the term, style, following Trudgill (1974) Preston (1989), Romaine (1994), and Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998). This term refers to differing levels of formality that are reflected in linguistic form.⁷ Researchers agree that style is a continuous, multidimensional notion and that a particular text is evaluated as formal/informal based on the cooccurrence of multiple linguistic features (Romaine 1994; Biber 1995; Bell 1997; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998). Still, depending on the language, some of these linguistic features may be more prominent markers of formal/informal style than others.

The formal style of the Japanese cooking demonstrations One of the principal indicators of formal style in Japanese is the elaborate system of honorification (Shibatani 1990). Japanese has three grammaticized systems for showing respect for the other, teineigo (‘polite language’), sonkeigo (‘respect language’), and kenjoogo (‘humble language’).⁸ Teineigo (‘polite language’), often referred to as “addressee honorifics”, indexes a general level of politeness, and is generally understood as indexing the speaker–addressee relationship (Martin, 1964; Shibatani, 1990). It primarily involves use of the polite endings — masu and desu (the polite form of the predicate formative word).⁹ On the other hand, sonkeigo

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(‘respect language’) and kenjoogo (‘humble language’), often referred to collectively as “referent honorifics”, index either an uchi/soto (‘in-group/out-group’) relationship or a difference in vertical status between the speaker and the referent (Shibatani 1990). The referent is the person(s) that is shown respect, and this can be either the addressee or a third person. Like teineigo, sonkeigo and kenjoogo involve predicates, but these systems are more complex and include several productive processes as well as a number of suppletive forms (Shibatani 1990). Basically, sonkeigo and kenjoogo function as follows. When the subject of the clause is someone other than the speaker, sonkeigo may be used to directly index respect for that referent; on the other hand, when the subject of the clause is the speaker or someone closely associated with him/her, kenjoogo may be used to indirectly index respect by humbling the speaker and his/her in-group in contrast to the other.¹⁰ The Japanese cooking teachers routinely used all three forms of honorification when they addressed the class. Thus they created a soto (‘out-group’) relationship between themselves and the students, and in the process, they also created a formal situation. This is illustrated in (1).¹¹ (1) Sushi (S: Suzuki) → 1. S: o-mise de o-kai ni naru toki niwa, HON-shop LOC HON-buy ADV become time at 2. . . . a-% – – ––––– 3. . . . inarizushi yoo no, name.of.dish like LK 4. age toshite, tofu:wrapper as → 5. . . . katte kudasai-mase. buy give:HON-POL ‘When (you) buy age (‘tofu wrappers’) at the store, buy the ones for inarizushi (a type of sushi).’ In (1), the students are the addressees, and Suzuki uses the teineigo (‘polite language’) ending -mase in line 5. She also uses the sonkeigo (‘respect language’) predicate okai ni naru (‘buy’) in line 1 to directly index respect for the students (the subject of the clause).¹² The predicate kudasaru (‘give’) in line 5 can also be considered sonkeigo.¹³ In (2), the students are the subject of the clauses in lines 1–3, and the teacher kudasaru (‘give’) in line 3. In the clauses in lines 5 and 6, the teacher is the subject, and she uses the kenjoogo (‘humble language’) forms mairu (‘come’) (line 5) and omise suru (‘show’) (line 6) to index her humble stance toward the students. She also uses the teineigo form -masu in lines 5 and 6 because the students are the addressees throughout this excerpt.

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology

(2) Torirebaa (N: Nishima) 1. N: . . . koo shite, this do 2. . . . o-nabe o ugokashi nagara, HON-pan ACC move while → 3. . . . teri o dashite mite kudasai. shine ACC bring.out see give:HON 4. . . . (2.6) ja mata, well again → 5. saigo no hoo no shiage ni mairi-mashi-tara ne, end LK side LK finishing GL come:HUM-POL-COND IT → 6. . . o-mise shi-masu ne. HON-see do:HUM-POL IT ‘While (you’re) moving the pan like this, (you’ll) see a glaze develop. (I’ll) show (it) to (you) again when (it) reaches the final stages.’ The Japanese teachers used teineigo (‘polite language’), sonkeigo (‘respect language’) and kenjoogo (‘humble language’) throughout all of the cooking demonstrations, thus indicating that they considered the students to be outside of their group (soto) and worthy of respect. This is consistent with the type of relationship that would be expected in this situation in Japanese society, where uchi (‘in-group’) members are generally considered to be family, coworkers, or close friends, and others are considered soto (‘out-group’) (Nakane 1970; 1974; Lebra 1976; Wetzel 1984). The referent honorific system is a canonical example of social deixis in that the boundaries between uchi and soto are socially constructed depending on the participants. As participants use these forms, they reify and recreate social structure as they instantiate their relationships with others at the moment of speaking. As the Japanese teachers used honorific language they created a formal professional relationship between themselves and the students and a formal professional situation.

The informal style of the American cooking demonstrations Applying the notion of style to English data is more complicated because there are no grammaticized constructions that index level of formality or distance between interlocutors. As I mentioned previously, research suggests that a particular text may be evaluated as formal/informal in response to a number of co-occurring linguistic features at all levels, including the level of discourse (Romaine 1994; Biber 1995; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998). In languages that do not have prominent grammaticized markers associated with different levels of formality, one way to assess style is to observe constellations of such features. Biber (1995) has found a number of linguistic patterns that co-occur in situations such as face-to-face conversations and telephone conversations. He suggests that the patterns reflect what Chafe (1982) and Tannen (1982a) refer to as “involvement.”

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I suggest that these patterns also index informality.¹⁴ Hedges, emphatics, amplifiers, contractions, demonstrative pronouns, and discourse particles, are among the features he mentions. Other more general features include “a reduced surface form, a generalized or uncertain presentation of information, and a generally ‘fragmented’ production of text” (Biber 1995: 116). I found all of these patterns in the speech of the teachers in the American classes, and I found other patterns that may also be associated with informality but are not mentioned by Biber.¹⁵ I will provide several excerpts that as a whole seem to indicate that the teachers in the American classes were using an informal style. The relevant linguistic features are underlined. In (3), they include the lack of agreement in the there-construction and the phrasing sit there and stir in line 1. The latter is perhaps an example of “a generalized or uncertain presentation of information.” In line 3, the teacher uses this rather than the indefinite article and the hedge kind of like. In line 4, she uses thing twice, rather than a more specific referring expression, thus creating a sense of vagueness and uncertainty. (3) Vegetarian Cooking (J: Jean) 1. J: . . . there’s certain foods you shouldn’t sit there and stir, 2. because then all the moisture comes out, 3. . . . and you end up with this kind of like, 4. . . . (1.0) stra=nge thing rather than a nice crispy thing. In (4), Gary uses the vague referring expression stuff in lines 1, 3, and 4, the amplifier really in line 4, the demonstrative pronoun that in line 5, and the contracted forms gonna and kinda in lines 5 and 7. In addition, kinda is a hedge. (4) Crab Cakes (G: Gary) 1. G: . . . it’s that stuff that’s called . . . sura=mi. ((REFERENCE TO 2. IMITATION CRAB)) 3. . . . (1.7) and if you buy the . . . stuff called Sea Legs, 4. it’s really nice stuff. 5. . . . (3.2) so I’m gonna put that uh in the mixer, 6. . . . (1.0) in the . . food processor, 7. . . . and (1.1) . . . kinda mince it. In (5), Pam uses the vague referring expression thing in line 1, the demonstrative pronoun that in line 4, and the hedge sort of in line 6. She also uses you know in lines 2 and 5, which may be considered a discourse particle. (5) Generic Bread (P: Pam) 1. P: those things, ((REFERENCE TO POTTERY)) 2. you know, 3. that’s=, 4. . . . that comes from the low firing, 5. you know the more um,

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology

6. 7.

. . . the sort of ethnic pottery, down . . . through Mexico and . . Italy=,

In addition to you know, which was quite frequent, the teachers used several other discourse particles. The most frequent were okay, now, so, and anyway. In (6), Jean uses a number of emphatics and amplifiers: really in line 2, incredibly in line 4, and very in line 5. (6) Vegetarian Cooking (J: Jean) 1. J: . . . she cooked the whole time she was here, 2. and she rea=lly made, 3. and she’s vegetarian, 4. and she made some incre=dibly good meals. 5. . . . and for no-fat I was very impressed. In (7), Gary uses the exclamation boy and the emphatic neat in line 6. He uses that guy in line 7 to refer to a referent that has not been previously introduced, and he uses the vague referring expression something in line 10. He also uses the demonstrative pronoun that in lines 7 and 11. Use of deictic expressions such as demonstrative pronouns is dependent upon the immediate context in that the interlocutors must be face-to-face in order to fully comprehend the meaning. Thus they are often found in informal speech. (7) Beef Carbonade (G: Gary) 1. G: it’s gonna give you addi=tional flavor. 2. . . you know, 3. . . things that . . . stick to the bottom? 4. . . . (14.3) I always tell that story about the first time that uh, 5. . . . I worked in a French restaurant and, 6. . . . boy I thought that was nea=t, 7. that guy was stirring like that. ((GESTURING TO INDICATE)) 8. . . . (1.2) so I walked <@ up @>, 9. . . . (1.1) and I don’t know what I had in the pa=n, 10. . . something. 11. . . . and I uh . . did that, ((GESTURING TO INDICATE)) 12. and everything went up, ((GESTURING TO INDICATE DIREC13. TION)) . . . and that way. Because of the vague references, hedges, and demonstratives, the excerpts in (3)–(5) and (7) all seem to be examples of the “ . . . generalized or uncertain presentation of information” discussed by Biber (1995: 116). The above examples show that in contrast to the Japanese teachers, the teachers in the American classes used an informal style to construct a relatively casual relationship between themselves and the students. Thus the class that they created was also comparatively informal.

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Content differences As I mentioned above, there were also differences in the content of the talk in the Japanese and American cooking classes. Though the participants in the American classes primarily focused on task-oriented content, there was also non-task-oriented talk. In contrast, the Japanese teachers’ talk was entirely task-oriented.

The content of the American cooking demonstrations Another factor that may contribute to the apparent informality of the American cooking classes is the fact that non-task-oriented content was often discussed. For example, the excerpts in (6) and (7) above concern personal stories rather than demonstrations of recipes. Indeed, there are many examples of personal stories, jokes, and gossip in the American cooking demonstrations. Sometimes the teachers introduced these digressions “out of the blue”. For example, in (7), Gary is initially giving the procedure for browning the meat for the recipe Beef Carbonade (lines 1–3). After a pause in line 4, he introduces a personal story that does not have any apparent connection to the recipe. In other cases, however, the non-task-oriented content was interwoven in the demonstration and was at least somewhat related to prior task-related content. For instance, in (8) Jean explains her method for cooking artichokes (lines 1–2). In line 3, she introduces a related story, concerning how her mother used to make artichokes. Then in line 10, she ends with a joke. The joke makes reference to a theme that had been mentioned several times in the prior discourse: decreasing fat. (8) Vegetarian Cooking (J: Jean) 1. J: . . I never cut them because, 2. this will . . . cook down. → 3. . . . (1.4) now, 4. . . . in the old days, 5. . . . (1.6) um . . . (1.1) when I was taught, 6. my mother made artichokes this way. 7. . . she’d always pour olive oil over each one. 8. . . . (1.1) so, 9. . . . i- it’s really fun. → 10. you can simulate it. ((PRETENDS TO POUR OIL OVER ARTI11. CHOKES)) ((STUDENTS LAUGH)) The next excerpt contains some gossip. Like the story and joke in (8), it was integrated in the demonstration. Prior to (9), Pam had been explaining that the recipe she would demonstrate was developed by Julia Child and a woman named Lilah Drake. In (9), Pam tells the class some gossip about Lilah.

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology

(9) French Bread (P: Pam) P: Lilah Drake. . . . she was the first woman . . ever to be=, . . um, . . . an official baker in France. . . . and she was a . . bri=lliant baker, she was a . . . very difficult person to deal with, and I think she went out of business because of her, . . . not because of her bread, but because of her personality. In the American cooking classes, most of the time the teachers controlled the floor, and they did most of the talking, but the students also spoke frequently. By asking questions (as well as making jokes) the students often initiated changes in content from task-oriented to non-task-oriented talk. For example, the excerpt in (10) evolved from a student’s question. The student (Vivian) had asked if it was possible to use frozen mashed potatoes in a particular recipe rather than fresh potatoes that had been boiled and grated. This discussion led to a digression concerning another type of frozen potatoes, known as Tater Tots. This in turn led to a discussion of using frozen peas (and Tater Tots) as an ice pack to treat sprains, which is where the excerpt starts. Finally, the teacher makes a joke that indirectly acknowledges the fact that the participants are not discussing task-oriented content (lines 11, 13–14). (10) Vegetarian Cooking (V: Vivian, a student; J: Jean, the teacher; A: Abe, a student; S: a student) 1. V: <X I’ve used Tater Tots X> as a cure for sprai=ns. 2. J: . . . (1.5) a cure for sprai=ns? 3. S: @@@ 4. V: frozen in a bag. 5. A: pulled muscles [and sprains]. 6. S: [frozen] — 7. J: frozen peas are better. ((9 LINES OMITTED)) 8. V: <X no, 9. [Tater Tots work great] X>. 10. S: [@@@@] → 11. J: [[this is kind of uh, 12. A: [[XXXXXXXXX]] → 13. J: therap- therapeutic vegetable cooking]], 14. you know. The teachers’ intermittent focus on non-task-oriented content contributed to the casual atmosphere in the American cooking classes. Through their personal stories, jokes and gossip the teachers (and students) created a lively, entertaining class.

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The content of the Japanese cooking demonstrations In contrast to the teachers in the American classes, the Japanese teachers focused on explaining the recipes they were demonstrating. Thus their talk was entirely taskoriented. Examples (1) and (2) above are typical of the content found in the Japanese cooking demonstrations, and below I will provide a longer excerpt. (11) Sushi (S: Suzuki) S: . . . ouchi de nasaru toki niwa, satoo to oshio ga, kanari shita ni, ano=, shizunderu to omoimasu node, . . . okome o arau to dooji ni, . . . kono . . awasezu wa, . . . choogoo shite kudasai. . . . soshite, . . . tokidoki ne, . . . koo . . mazete itadaku to, shizen to, . . . osatoo to shio ga tokete kuremasu ga, kyuu ni itashimasu to, . . . nakanaka tokemasen node, ‘When (you) do (it) at home, since the sugar and salt often sink to the bottom, (it) helps if you mix in the vinegar, sugar, and salt (‘awasezu’) while you are washing the rice. If (you) mix (them) this way, sometimes the sugar and salt will dissolve naturally for you, but if (you) add them suddenly, (they) won’t dissolve easily.’ There are no examples of personal stories, jokes, or gossip in the Japanese database. Unlike the American teachers (and students), the Japanese teachers did not discuss other unrelated activities (e.g., how to treat sprains), other teachers, or even their own personal experiences. I have explained what the Japanese teachers did not do. What then did they do? The Japanese teachers methodically introduced all of the dishes to be cooked during the lesson and then went about explaining the procedures for the recipes stepby-step, as they demonstrated them. Below, I have analyzed one of the Japanese transcripts, according to the content. Analysis of the content of this lesson shows that the Japanese teacher discussed only task-oriented content. This generalization holds across the other four Japanese lessons I analyzed as well. Examination of the regular patterns in the formality of the language and the content of the talk suggests that the Japanese and American participants may have different expectations about what constitutes a cooking class and how it might be realized. Below I will provide some anecdotal evidence for this contention.

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology Table 3. Content of the Japanese demonstration Daikon Intonation Content unit 1–7 8–100

101–202 203–244 245–505 506–522 523–575 576–697 697

The teacher explains the main purpose of lesson — to learn different ways to use daikon (‘radish’). Introduces the various dishes to be cooked that day: buri to daikon no nimono (‘boiled yellowtail and radish’); sasami no wasabiae (‘chicken breast with wasabi sauce’); sekihan (‘azuki beans and rice’); butajiru (‘pork stew’); daikon no shooyuzuke (‘radish in soy sauce’). As the teacher introduces each dish, she explains which part of the daikon (‘radish’) is used and makes some comments about the dish. For example, in the case of sasami no wasabiae (‘chicken breast with wasabi sauce’), she explains that though some people complain that they don’t like the smell of the ingredients in this dish, it is actually very tasty. General demonstration and information about daikon Teacher explains that she will start with the buri to daikon no nimono (‘boiled yellowtail and radish’) and gives information to orient the students to the ingredients at their Tables. Explains while demonstrating the procedures for preparing the ingredients and cooking the buri to daikon no nimono (‘boiled yellowtail and radish’) dish. Refers to a cookbook that has some of the recipes used in the class. Tells the students on which page they can find the recipe. Demonstrates and explains the next few steps of the recipe, adding the rest of the ingredients. Explains that the dish needs to continue boiling until the daikon is soft. Explains the ingredients and begins demonstrating the steps in the second recipe: sekihan (‘azuki beans and rice’) Transcript ends.

Students’ reported reasons for participating in the classes At the beginning of this article, following Miller (1984), I suggested that the Japanese and American cooking classes are comparable genres because they address the same exigence, a common social motive that is revealed through regular patterns of situated action. This does not mean that the patterns in the Japanese and American cooking classes are the same. I have provided ample evidence that they are not. What is the same, however, is the fact that the patterns are regular and recurring and that, taken together, they address a common goal. I also mentioned that Miller suggests that personal intentions (or goals) may be realized through the commonly construed exigence that is instantiated in a particular genre. Miller (1984: 162) explains, . . . at the level of the genre, motive becomes a conventionalized social purpose, or exigence, within the recurrent situation. In constructing discourse, we deal with purposes at several levels, not just one. We learn to adopt social motives as ways of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action. This is how recurring situations seem to “invite” discourse of a particular type.

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Because the participants in the Japanese and American classes used different strategies to construct the cooking class, we might ask whether their personal intentions also differed. Observations made while I was a participant in the cooking classes suggest that they did. Of course, individual students in the Japanese classes had varying reasons for taking the classes as did individuals in the American classes. Still the reasons for taking the classes reported by individuals in each culture seemed to indicate different ideologies about how the cooking class would be realized.¹⁶ For example, in the Japanese classes, most of the students in my sample reported reasons centering around learning to cook. A number of students said that they were taking the class in order to learn to make more interesting, nutritious meals for their families. In addition, a common topic of conversation among some of the students was the difficulty of getting their teenage children to eat regular, well-balanced meals. Implicit in these discussions was the idea that the mothers might be able to entice their children to eat by producing food that would be particularly appealing. The teachers seemed to be aware of this goal, as they sometimes made reference to foods that young people liked or did not like. Moreover, some of the younger, unmarried women reported that they were taking the class to prepare for marriage. I was later told that it is a common practice for young women to take such classes prior to marriage.¹⁷ In addition, for all three of the Japanese teachers, teaching cooking was their only job, and they seemed to take it quite seriously. It seems to follow that the intentions of many of the participants in the Japanese classes could best be realized through a task-oriented class, and that is the type of class they produced. As in the Japanese classes, individual students in the American classes had varying reasons for taking the classes. However, their individual intentions added up to a common goal that centered around socializing and being entertained. Some of these included meeting new people, getting out of the house, meeting a member of the opposite sex who could cook, and learning an activity with a partner. Though several people also mentioned cooking, they emphasized the entertainment aspects of the activity, saying that it was an interest or a hobby. In addition, all of the teachers in the American classes told me that part of their goal was to be entertaining so that students would sign up for the classes. Thus the participants in the American classes could best realize their personal intentions by jointly constructing a fun, entertaining class. Indeed, the jokes, stories, and gossip found in the American cooking demonstrations are quite entertaining.

Conclusion The patterns in the formality of the language and the content of the talk in the Japanese and American cooking classes constructed rhetorical situations that were similar yet different. They were similar in that they addressed a common exigence, the teaching/learning of cooking, but they differed both in the way this exigence was

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology

construed and in the way it was addressed. The Japanese participants apparently viewed the cooking class as a formal, task-oriented activity, and they reported personal intentions that were best realized through this type of activity. On the other hand, to the participants in the American classes, the cooking class was a casual, entertaining activity, and their reported personal intentions were aligned with this type of activity. The collective realization of individual intentions shapes both the exigence and the formal features of the genre, for example, producing a more or less formal, more or less task-oriented activity. As regular patterns of interaction become conventionally associated with particular situations and particular institutions within a culture, what we understand as social structure emerges (Giddens 1984). Thus social norms and cultural ideology are revealed through these regular patterns, of which genres are one type. Analyzing comparable genres across cultures thus provides a powerful tool through which we can gather insights about culture as it is instantiated in social structure and reflected in language.

Notes 1. This article was written in 1999, shortly after it was presented at the 24th University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium. The research for the study was completed while the author was a doctoral student and was supported by grants from the Japanese Ministry of Education and the Graduate Division at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A more extensive, updated analysis has recently been published by John Benjamins (see Mayes 2003). 2. Like Günthner and Knoblauch (1995), Bergmann and Luckmann (1994) define genres as socially constructed models for handling recurrent communicative problems. 3. I follow Giddens (1984: 118) definition of locale which is as follows: “Locales refer to the use of space to provide the settings of interaction, the settings of interaction in turn being essential to specifying its contextuality.” Giddens goes on to explain that this means more than just the physical properties of locations. Locales are “internally regionalized” which means that there is “ . . . zoning of time-space in relation to routinized social practices” (Giddens 1984: 118–19). For example, a house is zoned in terms of time and space and the activities that occur: Sleeping occurs in the bedroom at night, cooking is done in the kitchen at various, more or less, set times, etc. 4. Observations are from the lessons from which the transcribed data were selected as well as the other lessons attended by me or my research assistant. 5. This was true even for data not included in this analysis, collected from a different cooking school in Tokyo. In addition, I was told by the administrative staff at the Better Home Cooking School that their teachers did not go through a formal training program. Though the school did provide one two-hour orientation/training session, the teachers were not given scripted lesson plans to follow. 6. Of course, the timing of the demonstration and group preparation portions of each class varied slightly, depending upon the recipes and differing amounts of cooking times needed

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Patricia Mayes for different dishes. In general, however, both the demonstration and the group preparation portions of the classes were well choreographed so as to use the time efficiently. 7. There has been some confusion surrounding the terms style and register which are both used to discuss variation in levels of formality. Generally, style is used to refer to formal/ informal linguistic features and register is used to refer to situationally defined language varieties (Preston 1989; Romaine 1994; Wolfram and Schilling-Este 1998). Note that I use the term genre to refer to the latter. 8. Space considerations do not allow me to provide a detailed explanation of these systems. For more information, consult Martin (1964), Miller (1967), Ide (1982), Wetzel (1984, 2003), Jorden (1987, 1988, 1996), and Shibatani (1990). 9. The predicate, da (plain) and desu (polite), is most often referred to as the copula. However, Iwasaki (1993: 96) explains that this is a misnomer because its function is to convert nominal forms into predicates, rather than to link the subject and complement as a “true” copula does. He prefers the term predicate formative word. I follow his usage. 10. Sonkeigo (‘respect language’) and kenjoogo (‘humble language’) are often referred to as “subject” and “object” honorification respectively (Shibatani 1990). Subject honorification refers to the fact that the referent must be the subject of the clause in which sonkeigo (‘respect language’) is used. In contrast, object honorification refers to the fact that the referent is sometimes an object of a kenjoogo (‘humble language’), predicate. While the term subject honorification seems to describe sonkeigo correctly, I find the term object honorification misleading because kenjoogo is also used in clauses without an explicit object to indicate respect for the addressee or to indicate a higher level of politeness than would be achieved by teineigo (‘polite language’). Indeed, this occurs frequently in my data. 11. My transcription conventions are based on Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Paolino, and Cumming (1993). The following is a list of the symbols used in the examples: carriage return , . ? — . . . (n) ... .. % @ = [] X <X X> <@ @> (( ))

intonation unit boundary continuing intonation sentence final intonation yes/no question intonation truncated intonation unit truncated word long pause, 1.0 seconds or more medium pause, 0.4–0.9 seconds short pause, 0.3 seconds or less glottal stop laughter lengthening speech overlap indecipherable syllable uncertain hearing laugh quality researcher’s comment

In addition, the following abbreviations are used in the glosses: ACC (accusative), ADV (adverb form), GL (goal), HON (honorific), HUM (humble), IT (interactive element), LK (linker), LOC (locative), POL (politeness marker).

Genre as a locus of social structure and cultural ideology 12. In Japanese, first and second person are rarely referred to explicitly. The most common strategy used is so-called “zero anaphora.” In examples such as (1) (and (2) as well), the clausal subject is entirely clear because of the use of honorific forms. 13. Kudasaru is one of four verbs of giving and receiving that are used both as main verbs and as auxiliaries to indicate direction of transfer of objects and other less tangible items such as favors, etc. Thus in example (1), a more literal translation might be something like, ‘Buy the inarizushi type of wrappers, as a favor (to me).’ As is the case with referent honorifics, these verbs also provide information about the uchi/soto (‘in-group/out-group’) relationship or the vertical alignments of the speaker and referent. Thus kudasaru is only used when the subject of the clause is not a member of the speaker’s group or is of higher status than the speaker. 14. Biber (1995) only mentions level of formality briefly. For example, he suggests that one of the functions of linguistic forms is to conventionally index social groups , social roles, or situational variables such as level of formality. His work focuses on other types of functions associated with linguistic forms rather than on conventionalized indexing. 15. One reason for this difference may be that the spoken English in Biber’s (1995) study is taken from the London-Lund Corpus rather than from a corpus of spoken American English. 16. I did not formally interview students about this issue. However, discussions of the reasons people were taking the classes came up in a number of conversations in which I was a participant. 17. This practice may be more common in some socio-economic classes than in others.

References Bergmann, Jörg R. and Thomas Luckmann. 1994. “Reconstructive genres of everyday communication.” In Uta Quasthoff (ed.), Aspects of Oral Communication, 1–30. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bell, Allan. 1997.“Language style as audience design.” In Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds.), Sociolinguistics, 240–250. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Biber, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions of Register Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chafe, Wallace. 1982. “Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature.” In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring orality and literacy, 35–54. Norwood: Ablex. Du Bois, John, Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Danae Paolino, and Susanna Cumming. 1993. “Outline of discourse transcription.” In Jane A. Edwards and Martin D. Lampert (eds.), Talking Data: Transcription and coding in discourse research, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Günthner, Susanne and Knoblauch, Hubert. 1995. “Culturally patterned speaking practices: The analysis of communicative genres.” Pragmatics 5: 1–32. Ide, Sachiko. 1982. “Japanese sociolinguistics: Politeness and women’s language.” Lingua 57: 357–386.

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Patricia Mayes Iwasaki, Shoichi. 1993. Subjectivity in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jorden, Eleanor Harz with Mari Noda. 1987. Japanese: The spoken language, Part 1. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jorden, Eleanor Harz with Mari Noda. 1988. Japanese: The spoken language, Part 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jorden, Eleanor Harz with Mari Noda. 1990. Japanese: The spoken language, Part 3. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lebra, Takie. 1976. Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press. Luckmann, Thomas. 1992.“On the communicative adjustment of perspectives, dialogue, and communicative genres.” In Astri Heen Wold (ed.), The Dialogue Alternative, 219–234. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Martin, Samuel. 1964. “Speech levels in Japan and Korea.” In Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society, 407–415. New York: Harper and Row. Mayes, Patricia. 2003. Language, Social Structure, and Culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Miller, Carolyn. 1984. “Genre as social action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–167. Miller, Roy A. 1967. The Japanese Language. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nakane, Chie. 1970. Japanese Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nakane, Chie. 1974.“The social system reflected in interpersonal communication.” In John C. Condon and Mitsuko Saito (eds.), Intercultural Encounters with Japan, 124–131. Tokyo: The Simul Press. Preston, Dennis. 1989. Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Romaine, Suzanne. 1994. Language in Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected Papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague: Nijhoff. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1982a. “Oral and literate strategies in spoken and written narrative.” Language 58: 1–21. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wetzel, Patricia J. 1984. Uti and soto (in-group and out-group): Social deixis in Japanese. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University. Wetzel, Patricia J. 2003. Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite language from Meiji to the present. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Wolfram, Walt and Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. American Dialects. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 11

How people move Discourse effects of linguistic typology1 Dan I. Slobin University of California Berkeley

1. Linguistic typology and discourse patterns There are many factors that shape the form of discourse. Here I wish to focus on one factor. It is a seemingly minor linguistic detail, but it appears to have massive consequences for the ways in which speakers and writers frame descriptions of how people move from place to place. The linguistic detail is one of lexicalization pattern — that is, the verbs and associated elements that are used in motion descriptions. Following an important analysis of Leonard Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000), the languages of the world seem to use one of two possible patterns for such descriptions. Compare the English and French sentences in (1) and (2): (1) He ran into the house. (2) Il est entré dans la maison en courant. ‘He entered in the house by running.’ The same event is being described, but with a critical difference. Let us define the essential component of a motion event to be the PATH followed by the moving figure — in this case, motion from outside a bounded space to its interior. The path is given in English by a particle, in, and in French by a verb, entrer, the equivalent of our Latinate verb, enter. In Talmy’s terms, particles like English in and out are satellites to the verb. Because these elements identify the PATH in English, the language is referred to as satellite-framed. By contrast, French is a verb-framed language, because it is the verb that generally presents the PATH. The difference between the two languages can be schematized in Figure 1. The two lexicalization patterns have syntactic consequences that influence discourse patterns. Every sentence must have a verb. In French, the verb is committed to PATH description, and if one wants to add information about the manner of movement, it is done in an additional phrase, such as en courant in (2). In English, by contrast, the verb slot is free to encode non-PATH information, and, as a consequence, we often use the verb to convey the MANNER of motion — such as the verb run in (1).

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Dan I. Slobin Satellite-framed construction type MOTION, MANNER ↓ VERBfinite ↓ go,run go,run

PATH ↓ SATELLITE ↓ in out

SOURCE/GOAL ↓ N+(adposition,case) ↓ to the house of the house

SOURCE/GOAL ↓ N+(adposition,case) ↓ dans la maison de la maison

MANNER ↓ VERBnonfinite ↓ en courant en courant

Verb-framed construction type MOTION, PATH ↓ VERBfinite ↓ entrer sortir

Figure 1. Motion typologies This is not simply a contrast between English and French, but a quite general typological dichotomy. Most Indo-European languages, with the exception of the Romance languages, are satellite-framed, along with Finno-Ugric languages, Chinese, and others. The verb-framed languages include a quite diverse array: Romance languages, Semitic, Turkic, Korean, Japanese, and others. The following lists show the languages of the two types that we have been studying at Berkeley, across a number of different discourse situations. (3) Satellite-framed languages Germanic: Dutch, English, German, Icelandic, Swedish, Yiddish; Slavic: Polish, Russian, Serbo–Croatian, Ukrainian; Finno-Ugric: Finnish; SinoTibetan: Mandarin. (4) Verb-framed languages Romance: French, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish; Semitic: Arabic, Hebrew; Turkic: Turkish; Japanese; Sign Languages: American Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands. There are several major consequences of this typology. Here I want to focus on verbs that describe the MANNER of movement — that is, verbs like run, crawl, limp, stroll, strut, and so forth — verbs that present information about the motor pattern of movement, often along with the rate of movement, and often with some evaluative stance with regard to the movement or the moving figure. Apparently, the availability of an open verb slot in satellite-framed languages has led these languages to develop a large and varied lexicon of such verbs. I will present numerous sorts of evidence showing that this is the case, and will suggest that speakers of the two types of languages differ markedly in their attention to these dimensions of motion events.

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That is, I will claim that linguistic typology predisposes speakers towards certain types of construal or conceptualization of events. I will support this claim with various types of evidence, gathered with colleagues and students over the past ten years or so. In every instance, the procedure is to compare languages of the two types with regard to descriptions of the movements of animate beings from place to place. Because the research includes a number of languages of each type, it has become clear that we are dealing with a sort of typological determinism, rather than the influence of any particular language or its associated cultural and literary traditions. As discussed below, there are many ways in which French discourse about motion events is more similar to such discourse in Turkish or Hebrew, than to English, German, or Russian. There is no apparent explanation for the patterns we’ve found except for the typology of lexicalization patterns. There are two basic procedures, or types of evidence: (1) we can ask how various languages describe equivalent situations, or (2) we can gather discourse samples from various languages, looking for overall patterns of the description of motion events. Here I will present both types of evidence.

2. Descriptions of equivalent situations across languages 2.1 Translations One way to examine how languages of the two types describe equivalent situations is to look at translations between the two types. To begin with, we selected a chapter from The Hobbit (Tolkien 1937), because that book has been so widely translated.2 We used Chapter 6 — in which a variety of creatures move around a great deal — and used these materials to develop a coding scheme for all of the relevant dimensions of motion events. The translations we’ve analyzed so far are listed in (5): (5) Translations of Chapter 6 of The Hobbit Satellite-framed: Germanic: Dutch, German; Slavic: Russian, Serbo– Croatian, Ukrainian; Verb-framed: Romance: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish; Semitic: Hebrew; Turkic: Turkish Consider the sentence in (6a), describing Bilbo’s movements in search of his comrades: (6) a.

English original: He still wandered on, out of the little high valley, over its edge, and down the slopes beyond . . . (Tolkien 1937)

There is a single verb, wander, that describes the MANNER of movement. The PATH is given by a series of satellites and prepositional phrases: out of the little high valley, over its edge, down the slopes beyond. This is typical of satellite-framed languages: a manner verb and an associated elaboration of points along a trajectory.

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Another satellite-framed language, Dutch, uses exactly the same pattern in translation, as shown in (6b): (6) b. Dutch translation: Hij zwierf verder, het kleine hoge dal uit, over de rand en daarachter gelegen hellingen af . . . (Tolkien 1960) ‘He wandered further, the little high valley out, over the edge and beyond located slopes down . . .’ Translations into verb-framed languages, however, present quite a different picture. The French translation in (6c) is typical of the whole collection of such languages in our sample: (6) c.

French translation: Il continua d’avancer au hasard, sortit du haut vallon, en franchit le bord et descendit la pente au-delà . . . (Tolkien 1980) ‘He continued to advance haphazardly, exited from the high small valley, crossed the edge of it and descended the slope beyond . . .’

Note that each element of the path requires a separate verb: avancer ‘advance’, sortir ‘exit’, franchir ‘cross’, and descendre ‘descend’. Manner of movement is presented rather imprecisely in an adverbial phrase, au hasard ‘haphazardly’. I suggest that this sort of linguistic typology leaves little room for attention to manner of movement, unless it is especially noteworthy. The same contrast is found when we examine translations in the opposite direction — that is, from verb-framed to satellite-framed. Here I present data from a large, ongoing project comparing translations between the two types of languages. So far we have worked with novels written in English, Spanish, and Turkish, and translations between these three languages. The translation in (7b) shows what happens when Turkish has to be presented in English. The Turkish original in (7a) has the identical characteristics as the French translation in (6c): each element of the path is presented by a separate verb, and there is no description of manner of movement. The protagonists pass from Iğdır plain to Başköy; they ascend to Ahuri Vale; and from there pass to Ahuri Plateau: (7) a.

Turkish original: Iğdır ovasın-dan Başköy-e geçti. Ahuri koyağın-a çıktı, ora-dan Ahuri yaylasın-a geçti. (Kemal 1970) ‘Iğdır plain-ABL Başköy-DAT passed. Ahuri vale-DAT ascended, there-ABL Ahuri plateau-DAT passed.’

The English translator knows that this description applies to a group of soldiers hunting for a fugitive. Accordingly, an appropriate verb of manner is chosen: sweep. And the entire trajectory is compressed into a series of associated path expressions: along, on to, through, up on to: (7) b. English translation: They swept along the plain of Igdir, on to Bashkoy, through the Ahuri Vale and up on to the Ahuri plateau. (Kemal 1976)

Discourse effects of linguistic typology

In sum, the English original in (6a), the Dutch translation in (6b), and the English translation in (7b) are typical of a satellite-framed language; and the French translation in (6c) and the Turkish original in (7a) are typical of a verb-framed language. A major consequence of the typology, as I have already suggested, is a difference in the size and diversity of the vocabulary devoted to manner of movement. Various sorts of evidence support this claim. To begin with, let us return to the translations of The Hobbit. Chapter 6 has a remarkable collection of manner verbs; there are 27 types, as shown in (8a): (8) a.

English manner verbs in Chapter 6 of The Hobbit (27 types): clamber, climb, crawl, creep, fall, fell, flee, fly, jump, leap, limp, march, push (through), roll, run, rush, scatter, scramble, scuttle, slide, step, swarm, sweep, swing (oneself), swoop, trot, wander

By contrast, the French translation (Tolkien 1980) has 18 types, shown in (8b): (8) b. French manner verbs in translation of Chapter 6 (18 types): bondir ‘jump, bound, leap’, clopiner ‘limp, hobble’, courir ‘run’, debouler ‘bolt’, s’élancer ‘hurl oneself ’, s’enfuir ‘flee’, errer ‘wander ramble, roam’, fondre ‘pounce on, rush at’, frayer un chemin ‘clear a path’, (se) glisser ‘slide, slip’, grimper ‘climb’, marcher ‘march’, ramper ‘crawl, creep’, se rouler ‘roll’ se ruer, ‘rush, dash’, sauter‘jump’, tomber, ‘fall’, voler ‘fly’ As is evident from the English glosses of many of the verbs in (8b), they tend to be more general in meaning than English verbs. The French translator of a colorful and dramatic book like The Hobbit is certainly striving to find equivalents for English manner verbs; but in many instances the necessary forms are simply not available. For example, consider the English verbs in (9), and notice how two or more distinct verbs are rendered by the same form in French: (9) French equivalents of English verbs in a translation of Chapter 6 of The Hobbit jump, leap → bondir run, scuttle → courir sweep, swoop → fondre crawl, creep, slide → (se) glisser clamber, climb, scramble, swarm → grimper Similar patterns are found in translations into the other Romance languages, along with Hebrew and Turkish, whereas the Germanic and Slavic translations are much closer to the original. A number of analyses carried out at Berkeley reveal ways in which a target language accommodates itself to a source language or assimilates the source language to its own patterns of expression. In an earlier study of translations of novels between English and Spanish (Slobin 1996b), I found that only half of English manner

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verbs were translated into Spanish verbs. The other half were either replaced with non-manner verbs, or were simply omitted. For example, (10) shows a neutralization: English plunged is translated as cruzar ‘cross’. (10) English original: They . . . plunged across the road into the long grass on the other side. (Lessing 1952) Spanish translation: . . . cruzaron el camino hacia la hierba alta del otro lado. (Lessing 1979) ‘they . . . crossed the road towards the high grass of the other side’ The next example shows an omission: run splashing is replaced with run. Apparently it is evident to the Spanish translator that if one runs through water, splashing might occur. It is not worth slowing down the narration to add this detail. (11) English original: . . . he . . . ran splashing through the water . . . (Anaya 1972) Spanish translation: . . . corrió por el agua . . . (Anaya 1992) ‘ . . . (he) ran through the water . . .’ Similar omissions are shown in (12), where the English verb walk is replaced by a path verb in two verb-framed languages: cruzar ‘cross’ in Spanish, and girmek ‘enter’ in Turkish. It is evident that communication of PATH takes precedence over MANNER in these languages. (12) English original: . . . she walked in . . . (McCullers 1946) Spanish translation: . . . ella cruzó el umbral . . . ‘she crossed the threshold’ (McCullers 1982) Turkish translation: . . . içeri girip . . . ‘inwards entering’ (McCullers 1991) In the opposite direction — translating into a satellite-framed language — translators often add manner verbs. The bare path verbs of verb-framed languages are apparently too bland, as shown in the following examples of translations between various pairs of languages. In (13), French ‘enter’ is replaced by ‘step in’ in Dutch: a minimal manner verb is apparently better than a simple path verb. (13) French original: . . . lorsque le comte de Buondelmonte entra dans sa chambre. (Sand 1833) ‘. . . when the Count of Buondelmonte entered his room.’ Dutch translation: . . . toen graaf de Buondelmonte zijn kamer binnenstapte. (Sand 1994) ‘ . . . when the Count of Buondelmonte stepped into his room.’ In (14), the German translator of Don Quijote knows that he left the inn on horseback. It would be poor style in German to say that he ‘left’ when we know that he ‘rode out’.

Discourse effects of linguistic typology

(14) Spanish original: . . . cuando don Quijote salió de la venta . . . (Cervantes 1605) ‘ . . . when don Quixote exited from the inn . . .’ German translation: . . . als Don Quixote aus der Schenke ritt . . . (Cervantes 1837) ‘ . . . when Don Quixote rode out of the inn . . .’

2.2 Elicited narrations Another method for comparing descriptions of equivalent situations is to present speakers of different languages with the task of telling a story in response to a series of pictures.We have been using this method for quite some time, gathering narratives of “the frog story” across languages and ages (Berman and Slobin 1994; Özçalışkan and Slobin 1999). Speakers are presented with a little picture storybook that has no words, Frog, where are you? (Mayer 1969), and asked to tell the story. We have found quite consistent differences between the two types of languages with regard to motion descriptions. Consider just one scene as an example. The main protagonist, a little boy, is going through the woods looking for his lost frog. He climbs a tree and looks in a hole; an owl emerges, causing him to fall. This is a “neutral” description — but it is not the preferred description for speakers of satellite-framed languages. The sentences in (15) are typical of descriptions — by narrators of all ages — in three Germanic and one Slavic language. Note the use of a verb of manner of movement, such as ‘fly’ or ‘jump’, together with a verb particle or prefix meaning ‘out’. (15) Satellite-framed English: an owl flew out of here [age 3] the owl popped out [age 5] an owl flew out of the hole in the tree [adult] German: da kam ’ne Eule rausgeflogen (there an owl came flying out) [age 5] weil da eine Eule plötzlich rausflattert (because there an owl suddenly flaps out) [age 9] Dutch: dan springt er een uil uit het gat (then an owl jumps out there from the hole) [age 7] omdat er een uil uitvliegt (because an owl flies out of there) [age 9] Russian: iz duba vylezla sova (from oak out-crawled owl) [age 5] tam vyskočila sova (there out-jumped owl) [age 6] iz dupla vyletela sova (from hollow out-flew owl) [age 10] The pattern is quite different in verb-framed languages. The sentences in (16) are drawn from French, Spanish, Turkish, and Hebrew. With the exception of the last Hebrew example, all of the narrators — at all ages — use a simple path verb meaning ‘exit’.

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202 Dan I. Slobin

(16) Verb-framed French: le hibou i sort de son trou (the owl he exits from his hole) [age 4] y a un hibou qui sort (there’s an owl that exits) [age 5] Spanish: sale un buho (exits an owl) [age 5] del agujero salió un buho (from the hole exited an owl) [adult] Turkish: kuş çıkıyor yuvadan (bird exits nest-ABL) [age 4] ağaç kovuğunun içinden bir baykuş çıkıyor (tree hole’s inside-ABL one owl exits) [adult] Hebrew: pit’om yaca mišam yanšuf (suddenly exited from-there owl) [age 5] yaca mitox haxor yanšuf (exited from-inside the-hole owl) [age 9] yanšuf kofec meha’ec (owl jumps from-tree) [adult] The statistics are striking, as shown in Table 1. Except for that one Israeli adult, 100% of narrators in verb-framed languages simply said that the owl ‘exited’. There are differences among the satellite-framed languages, but in all of them, the use of a manner verb is a viable option for descriptions of this event. The Russian narrators are unanimous in taking this option. If we examine the entire range of verbs of self-motion in frog stories elicited from children (preschool and school-age) and adults, we find a large English collection, similar in many ways to the verbs used in The Hobbit. There are 32 types, as listed in Table 1. “The Owl’s Exit” in Frog Stories: percentages of manner and path verbs (numbers of verb tokens in parentheses) Manner verb

Path verb 68% (34) 82% (23) 83% (19) —

Satellite-framed

English German Dutch Russian

32% 18% 17% 100%

(16) (5) (4) (18)

Verb-framed

French Spanish Turkish Hebrew

— — — 3% (1)

100% 100% 100% 97%

(21) (64) (53) (42)

Note: The figures in Table 1 represent all narrators who mentioned the scene of the owl’s exit: English: ages 3–11, adult; US [data of Marchman, Renner], Australia [data of Wigglesworth]. German: ages 3–9, adult; Germany [data of Bamberg, Carroll and von Stutteheim]. Dutch: ages 5–9; Netherlands [data of Verhoeven]. Russian: ages 5–10, adult; Moscow, San Francisco {data of Durova and Yurieva, Slobin and Anilovich, Smoczyńska]. French: ages 3–10, adult; Lyon [data of Jisa and Kern]. Spanish: ages 3–11, adult; Madrid [data of Sebastián], Santiago de Chile [data of Bocaz]. Turkish: ages 3–9, adult; Istanbul [data of Aksu-Koç, Küntay]. Hebrew: ages 5–11. adult; Israel [data of Berman and Ne’eman].

Discourse effects of linguistic typology 203

(17). This represents large samples, gathered from ages 3–9 and adults in California and Australia. (17) English (32 types): buzz, charge, chase, clamber, climb, crash, crawl, creep, escape, flap, fly, hop, jump, perch oneself, plummet, pop, race, run, scramble, slink, slip, sneak, splash, splat, spring, step, swarm, swoop, tiptoe, tumble, walk The verb-framed languages all have smaller sets of verbs. For example, (18) shows the full set of Spanish verbs used by comparable samples in Spain and Chile: (18) Spanish (20 types): main verb: arrastrarse ‘crawl’, brincar ‘jump, leap’, caminar ‘walk’, chocarse ‘collide’, correr ‘run’, escapar ‘escape’, escurrirse ‘slip away’, huir ‘flee’, nadar ‘swim’, perseguir ‘chase’, precipitarse ‘rush, throw oneself ’, saltar ‘jump’, toparse ‘bump, run into’, trepar ‘climb’, tropezar ‘stumble’, volar ‘fly’ path verb + gerund: caer precipitando ‘fall precipitously’, partir zumbando ‘leave buzzingly’, salir caminando/corriendo/galopando/huyendo/persiguiendo/volando ‘exit walking/running/galloping/fleeing/chasing/flying’, seguir corriendo/persiguiendo/volando ‘follow running/chasing/flying’

2.3 Newspaper Stories As a final method for comparing descriptions of equivalent events, we have begun to look at newspaper accounts in different languages, with regard to the same new event. To begin with, it is immediately evident that news stories in English make abundant use of manner verbs. The examples in (19) are typical — both of The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle — as well as British newspapers. (19) a.

But he seemed unimpressed by the videotapes taken shortly after the killings, in which police officers are seen trampling and tromping nearby. (New York Times, 1995) b. As the University of California at Berkeley’s 29,000 students traipsed off yesterday to their first day of fall 1995 classes . . . (San Francisco Chronicle, 1995)

The same pattern is shown in comparing an English news story with equivalents in French and Spanish papers, as shown in (20). Note that, for the Manchester Guardian, troops storm the ship and clamber on board, and the ship breached the exclusion zone and powered across the lagoon. By contrast, for Le Figaro, the troops simply ‘take control of ’ the ship, which had ‘crossed’ the limit. Similarly, the Spanish newspaper ABC is only concerned to report that the ship ‘crosses’ the limit. (20) a.

Squads of troops . . . stormed the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior II . . . 15 commandos clambered on board . . . Greenpeace defied

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warnings not to breach the 12-mile exclusion zone to power across the lagoon in Greenpeace dinghies. (Manchester Guardian 1995) b. Les commandos de marine arraisonnent le Rainbow Warrior . . . Le Rainbow Warrior est passé a la offensive des l’aube, franchissant la limite des eaux territoriales francaises . . . ‘The marine commandos took control of the Rainbow Warrior . . . The Rainbow Warrior switched over to the offensive at dawn, crossing the limits of French territorial waters . . .’ (Le Figaro [Paris] 1995) c. Pero cada vez que una embarcacion se atreve a atravesar la zona de exclusión . . . ‘But each time that an embarcation dares to cross the exclusion zone . . .’ (ABC [Madrid] 1994)

3. Monolingual discourse samples 3.1 Novels We are now applying the coding scheme, developed in the study of The Hobbit, to novels written in English, German, and Russian — on the one hand, and Spanish, French, and Turkish — on the other (Özçalışkan and Slobin in press; Slobin 1997). The procedure is to track the movements of a protagonist from a stationary position until he or she stops once again to take part in a plot-advancing event. We collect 20 such trajectories from each novel. Here I present some preliminary results from seven novels in each of four languages: English, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The data are based on intransitive verbs of motion — that is, verbs of self-motion — both manner verbs and others (simple path verbs such as ‘enter’ and ‘descend’, and nonpath verbs of motion such as ‘go’ and ‘move’). To begin with, we can ask — for each language — what percent of such verbs are manner verbs. These data are given in Table 2, along with comparable data from adult frog stories in the four languages. It is striking that the figures are so different for the two language types, and so similar for the two discourse types. The satellite-framed languages — English and Russian — show from 41% to 79% of manner verbs, out of the total number of verb Table 2. Intransitive verbs of self motion in narratives: percentage of manner verbs out of total verb tokens (total number of verb tokens in parentheses) Written fiction

Oral frog stories (adults)

Satellite-framed

English Russian

41% (416) 56% (186)

45% (640) 79% (346)

Verb-framed

Spanish Turkish

19% (298) 21% (369)

18% (516) 23% (188)

Discourse effects of linguistic typology Table 3. Number of types of intransitive verbs of self-motion in novels Monomorphemic Phrasal

TOTAL

Satellite-framed

English

51

11

62

Verb-framed

Spanish Turkish

23 15

4 5

27 20

*Note: Data are based on seven novels in each language, 20 trajectories per novel

tokens in the samples of 20 trajectories from 7 novels. The verb-framed languages — Spanish and Turkish — show less than 25% of such verbs. The same pattern is found if we look at the number of types of such verbs in the sample, as shown in Table 3. (Here we have data only for English, Spanish, and Turkish; the Russian data are still being processed.) The English novels use 62 different verb types, in comparison with 27 in the Spanish novels and 20 in the Turkish novels. Here we also include phrasal verbs, such as ‘drag oneself ’ and ‘run on tiptoe’. We expected that Spanish and Turkish would take advantage of this option for composing manner verbs, but that was not the case. The lists of verbs used in these three samples are shown in (21), (22), and (23). (21) English: monomorphemic verbs (51 types): bolt, brush, bump, burst, climb, crawl, creep, cut, dart, dip, dive, drift, drop, edge, flee, glide, grope, hasten, hurry, jump, leap, limp, loiter, march, plod, plunge, race, roll, run, rush, rustle, scramble, skitter, slide, slip, sneak, spring, sprint, step, stride, stroll, struggle, stumble, thread, tiptoe, tramp, trip, wade, walk, wander, work. Phrasal verbs (11 types): drag oneself, edge one’s way, grope one’s way, hurl oneself, make one’s way, pick one’s way, push one’s way, strike a path, take a step, thread one’s way, work one’s way. (22) Spanish: monomorphemic verbs (23 types): andar ‘go, walk’, arrastrarse ‘drag.oneself ’, atropellarse ‘hasten’, caminar ‘go, walk’, chocar ‘bump’, cojear ‘limp’, correr ‘run’, deslizarse ‘slip, creep’, echarse ‘throw.oneself ’, escabullirse ‘slip, scurry’, escapar ‘escape’, flotar ‘float’, gatear ‘crawl.on.all.fours’, huir “flee’, irrumpir ‘burst in’, lanzarse ‘throw.oneself ’, pasear ‘walk, promenade’, pedalear ‘peddle [bicycle], pisar ‘step’, rodar ‘roll’, saltar ‘jump’, trepar ‘climb’, tropezar ‘stumble’. Phrasal verbs (4 types): abrirse paso ‘force one’s way’, apretar el paso ‘increase the pace’, correr en puntas de pie ‘run on tiptoe’, estar al galope ‘be at a gallop’ (23) Turkish: monomorphemic verbs (15 types): atılmak ‘leap’, atlamak ‘jump’, çarpmak ‘bump’, dalmak ‘plunge’, dolanmak ‘wander’, dolaşmak ‘wander’, emeklemek ‘crawl’, fırlamak ‘rush, leap’, kaçmak ‘flee’, koşmak ‘run’,

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206 Dan I. Slobin

saldırmak ‘charge.at’, sıçramak ‘leap’, sürüklemek ‘drag oneself ’ tırmanmak ‘climb’, yürümek ‘walk’. Phrasal verbs (5 types): adım atmak ‘take a step’, at kendini ‘throw oneself ’, ayakları ayaklarına dolanmak ‘wander about on foot’, ayaklarının uçlarına basmak ‘tread on tiptoe’, hamle yapmak ‘make a great leap forward’ Clearly, the two types of languages present quite different options to creative writers. Unlike translators, frog-story narrators, or reporters — who are bound to an established storyline — novelists are free to be as expressive as they please. Nevertheless, they seem to follow the preferred options presented by their language. To be sure, novels of great expressive power have been written in all of these languages; but there is a differential allotment of attention to various narrative factors. Briefly, it seems that novels written in verb-framed languages pay relatively more attention to descriptions of physical settings and protagonists’ inner states, thus making it possible to infer the sorts of motion events that are given more explicitly in the other type of language. (For more details, see Slobin 1997.)

3.2 Conversations It may be that the differences that we’ve been examining so far are limited to the written medium. Perhaps speakers of different languages are not so different in their everyday conversations. To check this possibility, we’ve begun to search corpora of conversations, looking for verbs of manner of movement. The data are preliminary, but they seem to clearly support the patterns that we’ve been finding for written texts. In a search of several hours of conversation in the London/Lund corpus and the Berkeley Discourse Lab corpus, there are 34 different types of such verbs — and they are the same sorts of verbs found in all of the written texts that we’ve examined. These are listed in (24). (24) Manner-of-motion verbs in English conversational data (34 types): clamber, climb, crawl, dash, dive, drag.oneself, drift, drive, flee, float, flop, fly, glide, hike, jump, leap, march, poke, plunge, run, rush, slide, sneak, stagger, step, stride, stumble, toddle, totter, trot, trudge, walk, wander, zoom. Apparently English-speakers do use these verbs in everyday talk. The examples in (25) are typical of both British and American conversations: (25) Motion verbs in English conversational data: . . . and then you clambered up on the platform . . . [British] . . . well, you’ve got to plunge into London . . . [British] . . . Miranda was played as a very gauche girl who sort of staggers around . . . [British] . . . I wandered around to this one main area . . . [American]

Discourse effects of linguistic typology 207

. . . we all dove under the table . . . [American] . . . as you trudge off to work to support them . . . [American] Data from Spanish and Turkish conversations are quite different. In (26) there is a list of motion verbs in about two hours of conversation between women in Colombia. There are hardly any manner verbs at all, and the few instances are simple verbs of walking, with one dramatic exception about going to heaven: (26) Motion verbs in Spanish conversational data (data of Laura Mayorga): Non-manner (9 types = 97% of tokens): alcanzar ‘reach’, bajar ‘descend’, entrar ‘enter’, ir ‘go’, llegar ‘arrive’, pasar ‘pass’, salir ‘exit’, venir ‘come, volver ‘return’ Manner (3 types = 3% of tokens): caminar ‘walk’, pasear ‘walk’, echar pa arriba ‘throw upwards’ (=going to heaven after death) In (27) there is a comparable list from about two hours of conversation among Turkish students at Berkeley. Again, the only manner verb is ‘walk’ — a quite neutral expression. (27) Motion verbs in Turkish conersational data (data of İskender Savaşır): Non-manner (5 types = 98% of tokens): çıkmak ‘exit/ascend’ (both senses used), dönmek ‘return’, geçmek ‘cross/pass’, gelmek ‘come’, gitmek ‘go’ Manner (1 type = 2% of tokens): yürümek ‘walk’ These preliminary data suggest that the patterns of attention to manner are quite deep in these two language types.3

4. Parent–child discourse Finally, we can ask whether these patterns extend into the language-learning situation. Here we have good data available: the parent–child speech transcripts in the CHILDES archive of child language. It is clear that parents use manner verbs abundantly with 2- and 3-year-old children, and that a large collection of these verbs is acquired in that age range. A list of manner verbs used by one English-speaking preschooler in this age range is given in (27): (27) Manner verbs used by an English-speaking child in a sample of 1,186 motion clauses: self-movement (18 types): boom, bump, climb, crawl, creep, dive, fall, flop, jump, run, ski, skip, sled, slide, slip swim, tumble, walk; caused-movement (13 types): bounce, drag, dump, knock, push, pour, spill, spit, splash, sprinkle, squeeze, throw, tip (Chouinard 1997; Mucetti 1997) The story is quite different in the three Romance languages that we’ve looked at. Here we have somewhat less data, but the examples are drawn from two children

208 Dan I. Slobin

each in Spain, France, and Italy — also in the 2–3 year-old age range. In all three languages, there is a very limited set of such verbs in the children’s speech, and most of them are relatively neutral, rather than highly expressive manner verbs. The data are in (28), (29), and (30). (28) Manner verbs used by two Spanish children in a sample of 596 motion clauses: self-movement (8 types): bailar ‘dance’, caer(se) ‘fall’, correr ‘run’, chocar(se), ‘crash’, escaparse ‘escape’, nadar ‘swim’, saltar ‘jump’, volar ‘fly’; caused-movement (3 types): empujar ‘push’, tirar ‘throw’, tumbar ‘knock. down’ (Mucetti 1997) (29) Manner verbs used by two French children in sample of 456 motion clauses: self-movement (6 types): courir ‘run’, faire du ski ‘ski’, glisser ‘slip’, nager ‘swim’, sauter ‘jump’, voler ‘fly’; caused-movement (4 types): jeter ‘throw’, lancer ‘throw’, rouler ‘roll’, trainer ‘drag’ (Chouinard 1997) (30) Manner verbs used by two Italian children in sample of 317 motion clauses: self-movement (6 types): ballare ‘dance’, cadere ‘fall’, camminare ‘walk’, cascare ‘tumble.down’, scapare ‘escape’, tirarsi ‘throw.oneself ’; caused-movement (2 types): buttare ‘throw’, spingere ‘push’ (Mucetti 1997) I would suggest that children are being trained by their language — from the beginning — to pay attention to those dimensions of events that are habitually encoded by the language.4

5. Conclusion We now have fairly clear evidence — from a range of languages and discourse types — that manner of movement is a more elaborated and available conceptual domain for satellite-framed languages than for verb-framed languages. There are numerous consequences for the structure and content of discourse, for translation, and for acquisition. There is not space to explore these consequences here (see Slobin 1996a, 1996b, 1997). But it should be evident that languages of the two types are rather different sorts of “filters” or “coding devices” of experience. What is perhaps most remarkable is that these differences seem to be entirely determined by the morphology and syntax of lexicalization patterns.

Notes 1. An expanded version of this chapter was presented to the 1998 LAUD Symposium, “Humboldt and Whorf Revisited,” University of Duisburg, Germany (Slobin 2000). The research summarized here owes much to the support of the University of California at Berkeley (Committee on Research, Institute of Cognitive Studies, Institute of Human Development) and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. It is a pleasure to

Discourse effects of linguistic typology 209 acknowledge that support, along with valuable discussions with colleagues and students at both institutions. 2. This research has produced a manual for coding of motion events in narrative texts, with support from the Institute of Cognitive Studies and the Committee on Research, University of California, Berkeley. The following people have participated in various phases of the work: Rutie Adler, Collin Baker, Heike Behrens, Lucinda Camões, Eve Clark, Aleksey Dumer, Jane Edwards, Joe Grady, Roni Henkin,Annette Herskovits, Jelena Jovanović, Reyna Lindert, Kevin Moore, Kyoko Ohara, Şeyda Özçalışkan, Enrique Palancar, Natalia Perelman, Paula Rogers, Alain Samson, Jonathan Segal, Sarah Shull, Gail Solomon, Sabine Stoll, and Sarah Taub. 3. We are beginning to explore consequences for mental imagery and memory for motion events, with rather surprising findings of large differences between English- and Spanishspeakers (Slobin 2000). 4. I have discussed this issue in terms of a neo-Whorfian formulation of “thinking for speaking” (Slobin 1991, 1996a).

References Anaya, R. 1972. Bless me, Ultima. New York: Warner. Anaya, R. 1992. Bendíceme, Última [Spanish transl. anon.]. New York: Warner. Berman, R. A., and Slobin, D. I. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cervantes de Saavedra, M. 1605. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha. Cervantes de Saavedra, M. 1837. Der sinnreich Junker Don Quixote von La Mancha [German transl. anon.]. Stuttgart: Verlag der Classiker. Chouinard, M. M. 1997. Speaking of motion . . . : How do children acquiring their first language learn to properly express motion events? Unpublished senior honors thesis, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Kemal, Y. 1970. Ağrıdağı Efsanesi. Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi. Kemal, Y. 1976. The Legend of Ararat [English transl. T. Kemal]. London: Collins and Harvill. Lessing, D. 1951. A Proper Marriage. New York: New American Library. Lessing, D. 1979. Un Casamiento Convencional [Spanish transl. F. Parcerisas and A. Samons]. Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara. McCullers, C. 1946. The Member of the Wedding. New York: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. 1982. Frankie y la Boda [Spanish transl. J. Silva]. Barcelona: Bruguera. McCullers, C. 1991. Düğünün bir üyesi [Turkish transl. İ. Kantemir]. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi. Mucetti, R. G. 1997. Thinking and speaking about movement: How parents and their children talk about motion events in English, Spanish, and Italian during the early stages of language acquisition. Unpublished senior honors thesis, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Özçalışkan, Ş., and Slobin, D. I. in press. “Expression of manner of movement in monolingual and bilingual adult narratives: Turkish vs. English.” In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics. London: Holland Academic Press. Özçalışkan, Ş., and Slobin, D. I. 1999. “Learning ‘how to search for the frog’: Expression ofmanner of motion in English, Spanish, and Turkish.” In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development., A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield, and C. Tanu (eds.). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

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Dan I. Slobin Sand, G. 1833. Metella. Sand, G. 1994. Metella [Dutch transl. R. van Witsen]. Groningen: Boek Werk. Slobin, D. I. 1991. “Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition, and rhetorical style.” Pragmatics 1: 7–26. Slobin, D. I. 1996a.“From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds.), 70–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [revised version of Slobin 1991] Slobin, D. I. 1996b.“Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish.” In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form And meaning, M. Shibatani and S. A. Thompson (eds.), 195–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slobin, D. I. 1997. “Mind, code, and text.” In Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón, J. Bybee, J. Haiman, and S. A. Thompson (eds.), 437–467. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Slobin, D. I. 2000. “Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism.” In Evidence for Linguistic Relativity, S. Niemeier and R. Dirven (eds.), 107–138. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Talmy, L. 1985. “Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms.” In Language Typology and Semantic Description, vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, T. Shopen (ed.), 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, L. 1991. “Path to realization: A typology of event conflation.” Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 480–519. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1937. The Hobbit or There and Back Again. London: George Allen and Unwinn. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1960. De Hobbit [Dutch transl. M. Schuchart]. Utrecht/Antwerp: PrismaBoeken. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1980. Bilbo le Hobbit [French transl. F. Ledoux]. Paris: Hachette.

CHAPTER 12

Why manner matters Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description Jelena Jovanovic and Aida Martinovic-Zic University of California-San Diego and Montgomery College

1. Introduction Recent crosslinguistic research on the acquisition of typologically different languages has focused on the lexico-syntactic expression of spatial relationships and motion events (Clark and Carpenter 1989; Bowerman and Choi 1991; Bowerman 1994; Berman and Slobin 1994; Slobin 1991, 1995a, 1995b, 1997). This research direction reflects current work in lexical semantics on the expression of motion and spatial relations and explores some of its latest theoretical proposals (Talmy 1985, 1991). As noted by Bowerman and Choi, “Spatial meanings are clearly fundamental to human cognition, and the system for encoding them is important not only in its own right but also because it provides the core structuring principles for many meanings that are not fundamentally spatial” (1991: 84). Talmy (1991) distinguishes five conceptual core schemas, or ‘framing events’: motion, temporal contouring, change-of-state, action correlating, and realization. Depending on the linguistic devices employed in the expression of the core schema, he classifies languages in two typological groups: satellite-framed (English, German, Russian), and verb-framed (Spanish, French, Turkish, Hebrew, Japanese). In satellite-framed languages, motion verbs may be conflated with manner, and path gets to be expressed separately, in the satellite (particles in Germanic, prefixes in Slavic). Verb-framed languages, in contrast, conflate motion with path, while manner is ordinarily expressed separately. These typological differences are reflected in the acquisition of the language-specific lexicalization patterns, and further have consequences for the narrative style and translation to/from the languages of the two types (Slobin 1997). The described typological contrast is illustrated in the English and French examples below. (1) Satellite-framed (English) The child ran out of the house MOTION PATH SOURCE +MANNER

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Jelena Jovanovic and Aida Martinovic-Zic

(2) Verb-framed (French) L’enfant est sortit de la maison en courant ‘The child exited from the house by running’ MOTION SOURCE MANNER +PATH Since the languages of the satellite-framed type encode path by satellites, the motion verb is lexically ‘free’ for the elaboration of manner, which is attested in many and highly-diverse manner-motion verbs. Verb-framed languages, on the other hand, specify path in the motion verb. Even though they have manner-of-motion verbs, their use seems to be inhibited since it requires expressing path outside the motion verb, which is not the preferred verb-framed lexicalization. The typological preference in these languages seems to be that manner is often implied, or, as shown in the French example above, that it is expressed in a separate phrase subordinate to the main verb (see Slobin 1997). The latter alternative, expressing manner as a separate phrase, is not used as frequently as motion-manner verbs are in satellite-framed languages, though this could reasonably be expected if the two language types had an equal interest in manner. Rather, verb-framed languages appear to lexicalize much less manner in any form than satellite-framed languages; namely, these languages have both fewer manner-of-motion verbs, i.e. lower frequencies, and are also characterized by fewer manner-of motion verb types. (Berman and Slobin 1994; Slobin 1991, 1997; Martinovic-Zic 1996; Martinovic-Zic and Jovanovic 2001). This pattern suggests that where a language typically encodes path ultimately has consequences for its speakers’ attention to other domains (Berman and Slobin 1994; Slobin 1991, 1997; Martinovic-Zic 1996; Martinovic-Zic and Jovanovic forthcoming). Much of the research into verb typology has focused on differences between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. However, differences among languages with the same typology should also be of theoretical interest. In this chapter, we compare manner-of-motion verbs in two satellite-framed languages: English and Serbo–Croatian, which we term free-particle satellite-framed and prefixed satellite-framed, respectively.

2. Relevant typological features of English and Serbo–Croatian English and Serbo–Croatian both employ satellites to encode path and direction of motion. In both languages, verbs can conflate motion with manner and/or cause, as in jump/skakati, or throw/baciti. But, whereas English satellites are verb particles, such as go in, up, down, on, Serbo–Croatian verb morphology creates a lexicalization pattern where satellites are prefixes added to the verb root, such as u-pasti, ‘infall’, s-ići, ‘off/down-go’ iz-juriti ‘out-chase’, etc. These prefixes are sometimes noted to combine with the root to create a monomorphemic verb, such that they create a new meaning that could not be deduced by simply adding the individual mean-

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

ings of the prefix and verb. For example, the prefix do-, ‘up to’, and the verb laziti, ‘to crawl’, combine to form dolaziti, which simply means ‘to come’.The affixation of path in Serbo–Croatian motion verbs means this language may be closer than other satellite-framed languages to the verb-framed pattern of expressing path within the verb. Merged directional prefixes may result in more conflation of path with motion verbs in Serbo–Croatian. In Serbo–Croatian, prefixes also frequently express aspect. Affixation of aspect contributes another semantic component to the verb. We have noted that verb-framed languages do not express manner verbs with as much variety or frequency as satellite-framed languages. This may be because the verb is conceptually filled with the path component. If this is the case, affixes carrying path or aspect in Serbo–Croatian may similarly fill the verb, and limited expression of manner could result. In the domain of temporal contouring/aspect English has different aspectual options from Serbo–Croatian; while in English tense distinctions are dominant, Serbo–Croatian can be termed an aspect-oriented language. Typological characteristics of English and Serbo–Croatian for motion event conflation and tense/aspect are given below. Typology of event components in English and Serbo–Croatian Spatial/motion reference English Serbo–Croatian satellite satellite Tense/aspect categories Progressive + − Perfective/imperfective − + Past perfect + + * (rare/obsolete) Present perfect + − English and Serbo–Croatian also exemplify lexical-structural variation for the verbs which conflate motion with manner. Again, whereas both languages have varied lexical verbs to highlight the manner of movement, Serbo–Croatian creates such meanings with the same morphological material (affixes) as used for path/ direction of motion, i.e. motion trajectory. Conceptual conflation of different motion event components is illustrated by the affixational modifications in the lexical root for the verb skakati/skočiti ‘jump’ (imperfective/perfective, respectively): priskočiti, ‘jump up close’, po-skočiti, ‘hop, do a quick, short jump upward’, skak(ut)ati, ‘hop energetically and repeatedly’, na-is-pre-skakati (se) ‘to jump up and down and over, repeatedly, until satiation’. An interesting nuance in the lexical-syntactic expression of the perceptual components relevant for the motion event lies in the way the two languages use satellites to link or separate the spatial and temporal framing events. In their crosslinguistic developmental study on the acquisition of form-function mappings and narrative competence in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish), Berman and Slobin (1994) found that English satellites are primarily used to mark motion trajectories, and considerably less to encode aspect. English Frog Story narrators use aspectual particles with change-of-state predicates, to mark inceptive/

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inchoative, or in durative predicates to mark iterativity or protraction. Berman and Slobin conclude that: “In the English narratives, grammatical particles are thus not highly favored as means of expressing aspectual phases of situations; rather, their main function is in elaborating locative trajectories “(Berman and Slobin 1994: 146– 7). Serbo–Croatian motion verbs employ the same morphological means, i.e. affixation, to express path/direction of motion, change of location, commonly manner of motion, as well as aspectual event points. Since the Serbo–Croatian verb system exploits a wide range of aspectual distinctions, and because the language has homophonous satellite forms for both locational and aspectual meanings, it is reasonable to expect that this typological profile will affect the ways affixes add meaning to motion verbs and the kinds of descriptions Serbo–Croatian speakers have about motion through space and/or time. For example, the Serbo–Croatian prefix pohelps conflate motion, manner, and inchoative aspect, as in the verb po-leteti,‘start to fly’, or path, manner, and satiation/completion, as in po-peti se, ‘up-climb/reach the up-goal destination’ (Martinovic-Zic 1997). Furthermore, in her analysis of Serbo– Croatian Frog Story motion verbs, Martinovic-Zic found that Serbo–Croatian stories have a less varied choice of prefixes/satellites,¹ primarily in younger narrators, and that these stories also have fewer manner-of-motion verbs than the English narratives (1997). In line with these findings, our research questions are as follows: 1. How do the structural/morphological and lexical nuances in the two proposed subtypes of the satellite-framed languages contribute to manner of motion verb types and frequencies? 2. How does grammatical aspect relate to the notion of manner of motion in Serbo–Croatian in contrast to English? According to Talmy (1991: 488), motion is “possibly the conceptual prototype [of the framing event]”, which may further imply a cognitive analogy between motion in space and temporal contouring. It seems conceptually real, then, that at least in some event types, the spatial and temporal components will have a simultaneous framing force, all the more so if they are instantiated through the same forms, as is the case in Serbo–Croatian. To explore whether and how relevant this conceptual linking is for the satellite-framed/verb-framed typology, we expand the definition of manner to include aspect-mediated manner of motion in aspect-prominent Serbo–Croatian, where affixes add aspectual contouring to verbs in general and verbs of motion in particular. (3) On je trcao. He be-AUX-PAST run-PAST ‘He ran.’ (4) On je po-trcao. he be-AUX-PAST PREFIX-run-PAST ‘He started to run.’

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

3. Hypotheses Different lexico-syntactic properties in prefixed and free-particle satellite-framed languages (Serbo–Croatian and English, respectively), will coincide with type-specific patterns in the lexicalization of motion. Specifically, we predict that these differences will coincide with: 2.0 Different emphasis on path: 2.0.1 Serbo–Croatian will have more frequent motion + path verbs. 2.1 Different emphasis on manner: 2.1.1 Serbo–Croatian will have less frequent manner of motion verbs. 2.1.2 Serbo–Croatian will have fewer types of manner of motion verbs. 2.2 Different emphasis on aspect: 2.2.1. Serbo–Croatian will involve more aspect in manner of motion verbs.

4. Method Motion verbs in the frog story naturalistic data (Berman and Slobin 1994) were analyzed and compared in English and Serbo–Croatian, across three age groups (age 5, age 9, and age 20+/adult). The English data come from the Berman and Slobin University of California-Berkeley database and consist of 36 narratives (N=36), 12 in each age group. Serbo–Croatian stories (N=36) were collected by Svenka Savic at the University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (N=23), and Jelena Jovanovic, University of California-Berkeley (N=13). The sample is as follows: age 5 (N=12), age 9 (N=12), and adult (N=12).

4.1 The task Our English/Serbo–Croatian comparison draws on the frog story elicitations used in Berman and Slobin’s crosslinguistic study on the acquisition of form-function relations in narrative (1994). Frog stories are based on a children’s picture book without words, where respondents are asked to look at the pictures and tell the story. Frog narrative is structurally organized in such a way that many narrative discourse functions² can easily be tested in the elicitation. Among these functions are linguistically conflated event components expressed by motion verbs and/or satellites, and those dealing with the temporal constituency of events, expressed by tense/aspect distinction (Berman and Slobin 1994: 19).

4.2 Procedure As outlined in the hypotheses, in this study we concern ourselves with languagespecific lexicalization patterns of motion verbs (Talmy 1991) in two satellite-framed languages: English and Serbo–Croatian.

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As discussed earlier, manner of motion is not as salient in verb framed languages, where path is expressed in the verb, as in satellite framed language, where path is expressed outside the verb. Previous measures of salience include variety of manner of motion verb types, and the frequency with which these verbs are used (Berman and Slobin 1994; Slobin 1997). We will consider how English and Serbo–Croatian differ in patterns of affixing path and aspect to motion verbs, and how these patterns correlate with patterns of manner-of-motion verbs. Our study includes all motion verbs elicited in Serbo–Croatian and English frog stories and compares how they are conflated with path, manner,or aspect in the two languages. While our analysis of aspect is qualitative, in considering path and manner, we organize motion verbs as: (1) V: 0–bare motion verbs (i.e. without information about direction or manner of movement); e.g. go, ići. (2) V:d — motion + path verbs (directional verbs); e.g. come, doći. (3) V:m — motion + manner, with or without direction; e.g. fall, chase, creep, pasti, juriti, puzati. Types and tokens of motion verbs in the frog story narratives were counted in each category. The number of instances of a particular verb are called tokens of that verb, while types refers to the total number of different verbs. Thus, no matter how many times a verb comes up, it is considered one type. For instance, when a respondent said run, run, run, we count one type (run) and three tokens (run repeated three times). In other words, separate or separable verb roots were counted as individual verb types, while each instance of the same verb counted as a token. Type/token ratios were determined in each category. This is a measure of how varied respondents’ choice of verbs are relative to number of clauses each produces in a particular category. For example, a respondent would have a higher type/token ratio if in 10 clauses she utters a total of 5 different verb types than if in 100 clauses she utters a total of 5 different verb types. We also calculated the ratio of types in a particular category to types in all categories, as a measure of how varied the verbs of that category are relative to the respondents’ choice of verbs overall (in all three categories). Finally, we evaluated the ratio of tokens in a particular category to tokens in all three categories. This measured how frequently verbs of that category appear relative to verbs of all categories. In the qualitative analysis of how aspect contributes to motion description, manner verbs were searched for cases where aspect presented in the prefix also had implications for the manner of motion. Manner verbs in each language were translated to the other language and lists of semantically related verb types were created. Token frequency and semantic frame of equivalents were then compared. The latter qualitative procedure was based on semantic closeness, i.e. verbs of synonymous or similar extended meaning were grouped into semantic clusters. This way, we expected to find how types of manner-

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

of-motion verbs were represented in each language sample, and to compare them in terms of any relevant differences in verb type and frequency. In other words, verbs were categorized in groups if they shared lexical content and referred to the same type of motion/event. For example, run, chase, race, and rush were clustered together based on the shared, conceptually related semantic properties. These verbs have the following Serbo–Croatian equivalents: trčati, juriti, jurnuti, vijati ganjati, bežati, trkati (se). However, some English-verbs of running/chasing have only approximate equivalents in Serbo–Croatian. For example, juriti and ‘race’ describe the same movement, but juriti also overlaps with ‘chase’, which can be translated into Serbo–Croatian by juriti + DO, or vijati + DO. Jurnuti, ‘rush’adds the inceptive aspectual nuance to the Serbo–Croatian verb. In English, the verb needs an additional particle for the full semantic correspondence. In the frogstory data, there are also Serbo–Croatian verbs with no clear equivalent in English. For instance, vlačiti (se) and vući (se), Serbo–Croatian verb root morphological variations, have no English equivalent, i.e. ‘pull along and through something’ and ‘pull along’, respectively. The latter qualitative procedure was applied to all motion verbs found in the frog stories in both languages.

5. Results 5.1 Frequency and variety of verbs across categories and languages The results may be found summarized in Table 1 (see following page). V: 0 and V:d Types and Tokens Adult English speakers (AdE) produced one type more than Adult Serbo–Croatian speakers (AdSC) in the V: 0 category, and one type less in the V:d category. Specifically, English respondents produced 6 different bare motion verbs while Serbo– Croatian (S–C) respondents produced 5. English respondents produced 11 different directional motion verbs, while S–C respondents produced 12. There is thus very little difference between the languages in types in these two categories. In terms of tokens, or instances in which verbs of a category were uttered, English respondents uttered 35 more bare motion verbs that S–C respondents, but 2 less directional verbs. Types/Tokens Since AdSC utter a comparable number of types but fewer tokens of V: 0 than AdE, the S–C type/token ratio is higher than English (0.31 compared to 0.15). That is, when we account for their number of utterances of bare motion verbs, S–C speakers tend to produce a greater variety of such verbs. In the V:d category, where both languages produced similar numbers of types and tokens, the type/token ratios are almost identical (0.26 in S–C and 0.24 in English), meaning that they produced a

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Table 1. Frog story motion verbs divided by language and category S–C

English

S–C minus English

V: 0

TYPES TOKENS TYPES/TOKENS TYPES/T.TYPES TOKENS/T. TOKENS

5 16 0.31 0.10 0.07

6 41 0.15 0.15 0.19

−1 −25 0.17 0.0 −0.1

V: d

TYPES TOKENS TYPES/TOKENS TYPES/T.TYPES TOKENS/T. TOKENS

12 47 0.26 0.24 0.21

11 45 0.24 0.27 0.20

1 2 0.01 0.0 0.01

V: m

TYPES TOKENS TYPES/TOKENS TYPES/T.TYPES TOKENS/T. TOKENS

32 158 0.20 0.65 0.71

24 135 0.18 0.59 0.61

8 23 0.02 0.07 0.10

49 221 0.22

41 221 0.19

8 0 0.04

TOTAL TYPES TOKENS TYPES/TOKENS

Note: S–C = Serbo–Croatian; AdSC = Adult S–C speakers; AdE=Adult English speakers

comparable variety of directional verbs given the frequency of utterance of such verbs. In sum, considering V: 0 and V:d verbs, S–C and English respondents are not markedly different in the variety or number of verbs they produce. The only notable exception is English speakers’ greater utterance (tokens) of a similar number of types of V: 0, so we conclude that they generate less varied bare motion verbs per clause. V:m Types and tokens AdSC produced 32 types of V:m verbs, compared to 24 produced by AdE. Thus, S–C respondents came up with 8 more types of manner-of-motion verbs. They furthermore uttered manner-of-motion verbs more than English speakers. AdSC speakers uttered a total of 158 manner of motion verbs, while AdE uttered 135. Thus, in terms of both variety and frequency of manner-of-motion verb expression, AdSC outdo AdE. Types/tokens AdSC produce more types and more tokens of manner verbs than AdE such that the ratio of types to tokens in the two languages is almost identical (0.20 for AdSC compared to 0.18 for AdE). In other words, there is little difference between the languages in variety of V:m per clause.

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

Thus, S–C speakers produce more utterances (tokens) and more types of V:m, but they are not more varied in V:m per clause. All categories compared Types/Total Types Relative to its overall variety of types, English has a greater variety of V: 0 (0.15) than Serbo–Croatian (0.10). The languages have a comparable variety of V:d relative to overall variety: 0.24 for AdSC and 0.27 for AdE. English has less V:m variety (0.59) compared to variety overall than Serbo–Croatian (0.65). Tokens/Total Tokens English has fewer V:m utterances and more V: 0 utterances compared to its utterances overall than S–C. The two languages do not appear to differ in relative utterances of V:d. Summary We address our hypotheses about path and manner in motion verbs by considering the type and token data. Our results do not confirm these hypotheses. We predicted that Serbo–Croatian would have more tokens of V:d than English, but the two languages were found to be nearly identical on all measures of V:d expression. We predicted Serbo–Croatian would have fewer types and tokens of V:m. On the contrary, we found it had more types and tokens of manner of motion verbs than English, though it did not produce more types per token, i. e. per clause. Thus, Serbo–Croatian speakers generated more manner of motion verbs, and more kinds of these verbs, but they did not produce more variety per clause. Serbo–Croatian speakers furthermore produced more V:m types and tokens relative to their V:d and V:0 types and tokens than English speakers. That is, though both languages had more types and tokens of V:m than of V: 0 or V:d, the preference for uttering varied and frequent V:m was greater in Serbo–Croatian.

5.2 Aspect-mediated manner in Serbo–Croatian Our second hypothesis predicts that Serbo–Croatian prefixes, which add both directionality and aspect to motion verbs, will contribute to the typological profile of Serbo–Croatian such that aspect will sometimes have implications for manner of movement. Due to the lexico-syntactic properties of the prefixed motion verbs, aspect mediates manner of motion by adding a temporal contour to the motion event. Since motion and temporal contouring imprinted by aspect cannot be grammatically separated, aspect seems to add a non-motor dimension to the Serbo–Croatian manner-motion verbs. In the type and token results discussed above, we included all motion verbs that were overtly translational (such as run, trčati) or translational by aspectual implication (such as head, naići, ‘come across). In considering the influence of aspect in

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manner verbs, however, we found it useful to compare only aspectually translational verbs in the two languages since such verbs have a direct implication for the concept of motion. We found that Serbo–Croatian speakers produced 8 types of these aspectually translational manner verbs, while English speakers produced only 4.

5.2.1 Aspect-mediated temporal contouring within motion-manner event

In contrast to the findings in English frog stories (cf. Berman and Slobin 1994), Serbo–Croatian frog story data show that verbal morphology marks aspect in a variety of ways. Among them are, for instance, stem change, prefixation, and/or infixation. Verbs of motion follow the same morphological pattern, as indicated in these examples: IMPERF bacati o-barati leteti trčati terati za-vlačiti

PERF baciti o-boriti po-leteti po-trčati po-terati za-vući

‘throw’ ‘throw down, dump’ ‘fly/start to fly’ ‘run/start to run’ ‘chase/start to chase’ ‘pull along and through something’ (‘to be pulling along/to be done pulling along’)

This set of verbs from frog stories represents only a sample of possibilities, conveniently found in our data. Although we primarily concern ourselves with prefixes, it is worth noting that stem change can also affect the temporal contouring of a verb of motion. For example, while bacati means repeated throwing, i.e. has iterative meaning, its perfective counterpart baciti refers to a one-time caused motion of throwing something somewhere, i.e. has a punctual meaning. Even though the core meaning of a motor activity/movement along a trajectory doesn’t change physically, the type of motion is additionally specified by the temporal contour.

6. Discussion At first glance, our results reveal a mixed picture, which doesn’t lend itself to a straightforward explanation. However, on a closer look, sub-type specificity can be traced in the domain of manner-of-motion description, especially if the role of aspect in manner of motion verbs is cautiously examined. In the discussion of our findings, we begin by pitting the results against the hypotheses. Then, we discuss the role of aspect in language-specific diversity patterns for Serbo–Croatian manner-of-motion verbs. Finally, we try to interpret some of our findings by using the methodology of ‘semantic clusters’, i.e. by determining and comparing lexical options of the two languages in expressing manner-of-motion verbs with closely related meaning.

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

6.1 The findings Our results seem to undermine the proposal that the fixed-prefix satellite-framed Serbo–Croatian will elaborate more path and less manner than English in its motion verbs, i.e. that the morphologically bound prefixes will lexicalize direction of motion and result in a relative paucity of manner descriptions, bringing Serbo– Croatian closer to a verb-framed typological group (Talmy 1991). Given the rejection of our first hypothesis, however, our reasoning would also predict the rejection of the next two hypotheses. That is, we predicted that fixed-prefix structure of Serbo–Croatian would result in many monomorphemic path and motion verbs through the combination of a directional prefix and motion verb. We then made an analogy to Verb-framed languages, where it is apparently the “filling” of the verb with path that inhibits further elaboration of manner.We proposed that fixed prefixes would similarly “fill” Serbo–Croatian motion verbs, and that speakers would therefore produce fewer manner of motion verbs. Since we did not find that Serbo–Croatian speakers produce more path + motion verbs, we would not expect there to be any inhibition of manner verbs. Indeed, Serbo–Croatian speakers produced more manner than English speakers. Our findings provide insight into what morphosyntactic features of a language can contribute to its typological distinction. In particular, we find that it is not simply the proximity of path to the motion verb that produces the paucity of manner observed in verb-framed languages. If this were the case, the prefixing of path to motion verbs in Serbo–Croatian would similarly result in less frequent and less varied manner of motion verbs. It seems that prefixing may be a convenient means for stacking concepts in the verb, without an upper limit on the amount of information that can be combined. Rather than having to create a whole new word each time another element is added (e.g. go + manner = run, run + path = flee), speakers of a prefixed satellite-framed language could simply tack a prefix to the verb (e.g. juriti + path = od-juriti). Attentional resources and limits on vocabulary may not be as axed in the prefixed satellite-framed typology.

6.2 Aspect-mediated manner of motion We now turn to our last hypothesis. We predicted that in Serbo–Croatian, as aspect, i.e. temporal contouring of the motion event, is lexicalized in the prefixes, the aspect will sometimes have implications for manner of movement. Our data show that aspect merges with motion in Serbo–Croatian motion verbs dominantly, whereas in English motion verbs this kind of lexico-grammatical overlap is considerably less prominent.³ We start with some examples from the frogstories, and then illustrate the same phenomenon with some additional manner of motion verbs, where aspect clearly mediates manner of motion. The first set of examples are the verbs which correspond to the English mannerof-motion verbs chase, race, and rush:

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juriti ‘chase/to be chasing’, ‘race/to be racing’ jurnuti ‘start to race/rush’ po-juriti ‘start to chase’ The fact that we can compare the first two variations of the same Serbo–Croatian root verb to three different manner-of-motion verbs in English offers in itself a nice typological comparison. Additionally, inceptive aspectual meaning in po-juriti has no single-verb counterpart in English. The difference between jurnuti and po-juriti is the difference in the manner descriptions for the beginning phase of chasing/ racing: while jurnuti conveys start, force, and speed, po-juriti focuses primarily on just the beginning point of fast motion. Some other Serbo–Croatian manner-of-motion verbs are even more aspectdependent. For instance, verbs zaći, or za-maći, ‘move behind, disappear’ describe movement which quick, punctual, completive, all of which hold together in a single prefixed manner-of-motion verb. Even more interesting are examples of non-translational verbs which gain some motion and add to the manner in which the motion is understood thanks to the aspectual prefix: za-glaviti (se) ‘get stuck’ za-kačiti se ‘get caught/hung’ za-kočiti ‘brake’ The aspectual nuances which influence manner of motion can be even more dramatic. To illustrate this phenomenon, we give examples from the set of manner-ofmotion verbs whose basic meaning is the one of jumping/hopping. skakati ‘jump’ po-skočiti ‘hop, do a quick, short jump upward’ skakutati ‘hop energetically and repeatedly’ po-skakivati ‘to hop, alternating from one foot to the other’ po-skakati ‘jump up, not all at once, but randomly, until everyone has jumped’ (refers to many people) po-i-skakati ‘start to jump out and complete the jump, randomly, until everyone has jumped’ (refers to many people) pre-skakati ‘jump over, jump rope’ is-pre-skakati ‘jump over several random hurdles and to satiation’ na-is-pres-skakivati(se) ‘to jump up and down and over, repeatedly, until satiation’ We hope to have shown that aspect does not detract from manner of motion, rather it may highlight it or become one default way in which motion is expressed. Aspect prominence in a satellite-framed language like Serbo–Croatian makes communicating motion through the boundaries of motion (inceptive, etc) a more viable and ready option (i.e. more the default lexico-syntactic strategy), as reflected in the lexical frequency of such verbs.

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

Based on the Serbo–Croatian examples above, we further speculate that languages with prominent aspect should differ systematically from those without in the frequency with which motion verbs are translational only by aspectual implication.

6.3 Semantic clusters In both languages, verbs could be found whose translation was limited. For example, Serbo–Croatian to English translation was only possible through some verbs preceding or following the action described in the verb, such as the Serbo–Croatian inceptive-aspect verbs poći, krenuti, ‘start to go, set off ’. On the other hand, English to Serbo–Croatian translation was limited for some manner-of-motion verbs which express the sound of motion when the moving figure comes into contact with its designated goal. These verbs are especially numerous in the stories told by the 5-year-old English narrators, and include: buzz, bang, pow, splash, splat. None of these onomatopoeic manner-of-motion verbs has an equivalent in Serbo–Croatian. Likewise, without an equivalent are also some other manner-of-motion verbs, such as swoop, tiptoe, pop, and skulk. As we already mentioned in the section about aspect-mediated manner in Serbo–Croatian, some English verbs of running/chasing have only approximate equivalents in Serbo–Croatian. For example juriti and ‘race’ describe the same movement, but juriti also overlaps with ‘chase’, which can be translated into Serbo– Croatian by juriti + DO, or vijati + DO. Jurnuti corresponds to ‘rush’, although the inceptive aspectual nuance added to the Serbo–Croatian verb cannot be rendered by the English equivalent alone, i. e. it needs an additional particle for the full semantic correspondence. On the other hand, vlačiti (se)⁴ and vući (se), Serbo–Croatian morpho-phonological variations of the same root, have no English equivalents to mean ‘pull along and through something’ and ‘pull along’, respectively. In sum, the total number of manner-of-motion verb types which were not translatable with the types from data in the other language is 15 for English as opposed to 7 in Serbo–Croatian. English has twice as many non-translatable manner-ofmotion types as Serbo–Croatian. In terms of the semantic clusters (semantically related verb types), we found 11 clusters in the English data, which contrasts with 6 clusters in the Serbo–Croatian frog stories. On both accounts, then, it seems that English speakers allow for more manner-of-motion semantic clustering than the speakers of Serbo–Croatian. We are, however, fully aware that this kind of qualitative comparison has only limited validity, and has to be taken tentatively until more elaborate cross-language comparisons can be made. The problem of semantic reference is well known not only to linguists, but also philosophers, psychologists, and translation theorists, and can only be touched upon within the scope of this chapter. We propose that examining a range of meaning for manner-of-motion verbs crosslinguistically may allow a qualitative insight into the nuances of motion verb lexicalization, which may otherwise remain buried in the number-crunching process of a solely quantitative analysis.

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7. Conclusion In this chapter we have tried to show how languages of the same typological type may manifest important subtype variation of a similar lexicalization pattern. In this case, we have selected a satellite-framed typological group (Talmy 1991), which is represented by English (free-particle satellite-framed language), and Serbo– Croatian (prefixed satellite-framed language). Our main reasoning was that the difference in lexico-syntactic processes involved in satellite event-framing would have consequences for within-type differences in lexicalization, more specifically in the lexicalization of the motion event. This led us to predict that English elaborates manner of motion more than does Serbo–Croatian, and we expected to find systematic differences in frequency, diversity, and type of the manner-of-motion descriptions. We also expected to find strong evidence of aspectual overlay in the Serbo–Croatian motion verbs, where aspect not only conflates the spatial and temporal components, but also sometimes has implications for manner of movement. Based on the evidence found in the data, our first three hypotheses are not supported. Namely, Serbo–Croatian and English do not differ in the frequency of their path + motion verbs. Furthermore, Serbo–Croatian has somewhat greater manner + motion verb frequencies and more manner of motion verb types. In our last hypothesis we predicted that Serbo–Croatian motion verbs, relying largely on prefixes for both directionality and aspect, would incorporate aspect in the motion event, which will sometimes have implications for manner of motion. The findings from the Serbo–Croatian frog story data seem to go in precisely that direction. We believe that lexicalization of motion in Serbo–Croatian is affected by temporal contouring, and that this spatial-temporal overlap is typologically important for expressing manner of motion in at least two ways: (1) it provides an event-internal aspectual perspective of motion; (2) it can have direct implications for manner of motion, which we term aspect-mediated motion. We conclude by noting that, although we did not find the predicted differences in path and manner-of-motion descriptions of English and Serbo–Croatian speakers, lexicalization patterns evident in aspect-mediated motion reveal some typological nuances, which makes the entire research effort worth pursuing further, while possibly applying other diversity measures and qualitative comparisons. Prefixed satellite-framed languages may indeed be importantly similar to free-particle satellite-framed languages on some linguistic variables, but considerably dissimilar on others. Our finding that directional prefixes did not inhibit manner description calls into question the contribution of prefixes to “attention channeling” (Berman and Slobin 1994) and language specific lexicalization patterns. The role of prefixes in determining linguistic typology bears more thorough exploration. This brings us to propose that, rather than positing a sharp binary distinction between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, it may be more beneficial to speak about a range of typological options, where the members of the typological

Contrasting English and Serbo–Croatian typology in motion description

category vary in the degree to which they follow the same typological pattern or somehow deviate from it. Further research is needed which would compare more languages of the same group for a range of typological profiles. It is our view that their typologies do not necessarily belong in the same homogenous category, and that continued in-depth analyses may reveal all the details of the likely variation.

Acknowledgements We wish to express our gratitude to Dan Slobin, for all his guidance and support. His work has been and continues to be an inspiration in our research efforts. We also wish to thank Nada Miljković, for her help in collecting the additional Serbo– Croatian narratives and expanding our database.

Notes 1. This is to be expected of homophonous forms mapping on to many functions, such as different locational, directional, and aspectual components of motion events. 2. In Berman and Slobin’s words, function “refers to the roles played by forms to convey structured characteristics of events in narrative” (1994: 19). 3. In addition to lexical aspect, English speakers use progressive and perfect aspect to mark ongoing actions and anteriority, respectively. However, particles (satellites), are used primarily locationally, and not aspectually (Berman and Slobin 1994). We note that Serbo–Croatian and English frogstories do not vary in the choice of the dominant narrative tense, but Serbo– Croatian prefixes much more prominently coalesce locational and aspectual meanings. 4. Vlačiti se typically combines with prefixes for additional meaning, such as za-vlačiti se, ‘in-pull/get stuck’, pro-vlačiti se, ‘through-pull slowly’ raz-vlačiti se, ‘pull about lazily’. In this regard, both satellite-framed languages (English and Serbo–Croatian) follow the same typological pattern. Serbo–Croatian reflexive se, ‘oneself ’ complicates the picture further, which we cannot go into in the present chapter.

References Berman, R. and Slobin D. I. (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlabum. Bowerman, M. and Choi, S. (1991) “Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: the influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns.” Cognition 41: 83–121. Bowerman, M. (1994) “Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive dispositions play?” In P. Bloom (ed.), Language Acquisition: Core readings, 329–363. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martinovic-Zic, A. (1997) “Satellites as local trajectories: English and Serbo–Croatian.” In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, and R. Shillcock, eds., Proceedings of the Gala ’97 Conference on Language Acquisition, 109–114. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Martinovic-Zic, A. and J. Jovanovic (2001) “Conceptualization of motion and languagespecific constraints in first language acquisition” MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 37:

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226 Jelena Jovanovic and Aida Martinovic-Zic Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, E.V. and Carpenter, K. L. (1989) “The notion of source in language acquisition.” Language 65: 1–32. Slobin, D. I. (1991) “Learning to think for speaking: native language, cognition, and rhetorical style.” Pragmatics 1: 7–26. Slobin, D. I. (1995a) “Two ways to travel: verbs of motion in English and Spanish.” In M. Shibatani and S. Thompson (eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their form and meaning, 195–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slobin, D. I. (1995b) “From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’.” In J. J. Gumperz, and S. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 70–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D. I. (1997) “Mind, code, and text.” In J. Bybee, J. Haiman, and S. Thompson (eds.), Essays on Language Function and Language Type, 437–467. Talmy, L. (1991) “Paths to realization: a typology of event conflation.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 17: 480–519.

CHAPTER 13

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives Mary Seig Ball State University

Researchers in a variety of fields have identified similar characteristics of narrative as a discourse unit; however, these same researchers do not agree as to how a narrative is segmented, how its “segments” relate to one another, and the importance of those segments to the surrounding context. The definition of the specific parts or relations found within narrative is still the object of intense debate, which is fueled by differences in the types of texts studied (oral vs. written narratives, personal experience stories vs. memory recall stories), and by differences in research goals (for example, identifying the quality of narrative or elaborating an underlying human memory structure). In this section, I will briefly outline various analysis techniques of narrative and how they relate to episodic organization. Story grammarians have attempted to specify all of the parts of narrative with the idea that if these parts could be defined and their relationships established, then perhaps a scale of “narrative goodness” could be found. They were initially attempting to chart the structure within narratives in much the same way that sentences are diagrammed. Eventually, as the story grammars were being developed, the idea of an internal segmentation of narrative called episode developed. Although the story grammar analyses outline elaborate views of episodes and the various possibilities of the structure of those episodes, these analyses fall short of a comprehensive view of narrative structure in three ways. First, because their initial goal was to determine the quality of narrative in an “objective” way, they have not informed the discussion about the extent to which narrative production reflects perception. Furthermore, episodic analysis (such as Stein and Glenn 1979; Peterson and McCabe 1983) largely ignores language. They do not give definitions of episode which are linguistically quantifiable or measurable (for example, differences in verb morphology, reference, or propositional content) separate from introspection and intuition. And finally, the approach that they have used has resulted in complex, unwieldy schemas for narrative which are being constantly updated as new information arises. Certainly, in narrative, each separate action of a character or a human is not an episode. Humans segment their lives or their narratives at a gestalt level; however, that segmentation and how it is done cross-linguistically is at the heart of the investigation for this research. Humans, on some level, conceptualize wholes, not parts;

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and parts only in the purpose they play in the whole (Downing 1980). And, how those parts, arguably episodes, are coded linguistically may differ depending upon the language of communication and the perception of the speaker. Throughout his career, Chafe (1974, 1980, 1988, 1994) has examined the linguistic evidence for a hierarchy of perception and processing. His evidence for this hierarchy is the prosodic and syntactic elements, which coincide in varying degrees to form intonation units and correspondingly, centers of interest. Because narrative has a special status as a discourse unit, some sort of idea of the narrative schema is held in semi-active consciousness; otherwise, coherence suffers because there is no overall goal of the narrative. Hence, although we humans can think great big thoughts, we only do so by breaking them down into pieces (linguistically and conceptually) which we can handle in active consciousness. A further discussion related to consciousness describes the interaction between introverted and extroverted consciousness. Chafe (1994) argues that the language used to represent events being remembered or imagined (introverted consciousness) qualitatively differs from language used to describe events being perceived, acted upon, or evaluated in the current environment (extroverted consciousness). Extroverted consciousness has the quality of “a continuous, uninterrupted flow” (p. 202). The experiences being experienced flowing directly out of the experiences immediately prior and into those that will ensue. Extroverted consciousness has available a wealth of detail by virtue of the fact that the speaker is in the environment. When a speaker is employing extroverted consciousness, perceptual choices must be made about what to code linguistically and how to code it. Introverted consciousness has an “islandlike quality” (p. 202) whereby past experiences are displaced from the current situation and remembered as isolated segments of experience, requiring a spatial or temporal grounding for the listener. Chafe argues that this is why when a speaker begins to share an introverted topic, they typically begin by giving a setting or orientation to the listener so that the listener can mentally join them in the distant arena of their experience. Introverted consciousness, because it deals with things remembered, does not have the same quality of detail except when the experiences being recalled are generic (i.e. enriched by virtue of their repeated experience). In introverted consciousness, that wealth of detail is not there and the perceptual requirement of segmentation and weeding-out of detail has been completed already. Slobin (1996) has expanded this idea typologically when he encourages linguists to move away from the idea of “thought” and “language” to “thinking for speaking.” His argument, which grew out of the frog story research (Berman and Slobin 1994), is that the experience is not just a group of events in an objective reality which must be translated into language. Instead, humans experience events and those events pass through a filter (which is language) in order to become “verbalized events” (p. 75). Each language has typological options which are required for events to become verbalized events. “There is a special kind of thinking that is intimately tied to language — namely thinking that is carried out, on-line, in the process of speak-

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 229

ing” (p. 75). Children who are learning their first language are learning particular ways of thinking for speaking — those ways that are related to the requirements of the grammar of their language evidenced by: the rhetorical style which is generally used, and temporal and spatial descriptions. One further question regarding episodic structure and its linguistic coding concerns its variability across languages. Numerous studies have analyzed certain functional relationships within narrative cross-linguistically to determine the extent of the overlap of narrative structure across languages and cultures (Chafe 1980; Downing 1980; Berman and Slobin 1995; Clancy 1980a, b; and others). These studies have attempted to outline the impact of linguistic and cultural typology in the production of narrative. In order to identify the linguistic features which mark episode boundaries, we must examine a variety of linguistic research that has used narrative elicitation to focus on the linguistic marking of beginnings and the hierarchical salience of entities within a discourse unit. Tomlin (1983, 1987) argues for a functional syntax of reference which is based on an episodic approach. Tomlin found that regardless of where the perceptual breaks, arguably episode boundaries, were placed, subjects used nouns to reinstate reference across episode boundaries and pronouns within episodes regardless of the non-linguistic manipulation. Expanding upon the idea of reference as an indicator of attention allocation, Bates and Devescovi (1989) examined various iterations of reference in relation to the concepts of given and new information in English and Italian narratives. In general, they found that lexicalization, ellipsis, definiteness and pronominalization occur more often with given information, and indefiniteness was most often reserved for new information. Bates and Devescovi (1989) also demonstrated that there are cross-linguistic differences in narrative production (and perhaps perception?) which result at least in part from the typology of the languages in question. In his 1989 study, using thirty subjects from each of ten languages, Sridhar attempted to demonstrate that “a number of crucial properties of language — including word order, clause order, choice of perspective, structure of locative expressions, degree and type of elaboration of referential expressions, negation, transitivity, and a host of others — are determined by universal cognitive principles involving the perceptual, motivational, and communicative dynamics of human informational processing” (p. 209). Sridhar argues that all languages contain structural devices and tendencies which enable speakers to “express certain fundamental cognitive distinctions” (p. 223). Secondly, he demonstrated that a large portion of the way humans construct language is determined through cognitive and perceptual principles. Chafe’s 1980 pear story film has been the basis for numerous studies regarding the overall structure of narrative and comparative analysis of the pear story narrative in different languages (Tannen 1980), lexical choices (Downing 1980), referential choice (Clancy 1980a) and definiteness (Dubois 1980). Each has taken the idea of shifting consciousness and applied it to language in an attempt to define,

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or even just identify, a linguistic, syntactic, or semantic correlate for the concept of episode.

The current study The current study investigates the episodic structure of narrative from two perspectives. The first view grows out of an examination of the production of narrative — specifically, out of the linguistic devices that have been previously identified to mark episode boundaries. An examination of those linguistic devices across languages and formats may lead to a linguistically quantifiable measure of episodic structure. The second view examines the perception of narrative through its production across two typologically different languages and two perceptually different formats.

Method and materials The narrative tool for this study was a picture book entitled Frog, Where are you? written by Mercer Mayer (1976). Subjects told the story from either the book form (as the pictures were originally published) or a scroll form (where the pictures were laid end to end on a long roll of paper). In the scroll form, subjects could view eight or ten of the pictures at a time with the only boundaries being the frames of the pictures themselves. The 100 subjects for this study consisted of fifty American and fifty Japanese university students. In each language / format group (i.e. Japanese Book/Scroll, English Book/Scroll), there were 15 males and 10 females. Each subject was given a copy of the picture book (either in book or scroll form). The prompt follows. This is a children’s picture story. There are no words written for this story. National Public Radio would like to play stories like this one on Saturday evenings for young children to listen to on the radio right before they go to bed. The children do not have the pictures to look at, only you, the announcer on the radio program, will have them. Children will be lying in bed listening to you tell them this story. Take about five minutes to look through the pictures and learn the story yourself. Then record the story in English for the children to hear next weekend. You may look at the pictures as you tell the story.

A native speaker of Japanese translated this prompt, and another native speaker checked the translation. The English and Japanese prompts were identical except for two changes. Instead of using National Public Radio (NPR) as its forum, the Japanese prompt uses NHK, a comparable company in Japan. Secondly, Japanese speakers were asked to record in their native language. In previous narrative studies, subjects told the story to an interviewer who was present and listening, which led some subjects to assume that the listener already

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives

knew the story. This interviewer interference manifested itself in such ways as subjects beginning the story with definite articles or referring to the picture book with gestures during the storytelling (Slobin 1995). This study was designed so that no listener was present, and this prompt was designed to overcome interviewer interference. The stories were collected in a listening lab setting; subjects sat at separate carrels and completed the task. Subjects wore headsets with attached microphones to simulate the “radio program” task.

Data collection Each groups’ stories were transcribed into intonation units by native speakers of the language of the story. For this portion, Chafe’s (1994) criteria for intonation units were used. Japanese transcribers were trained with both Japanese and English examples of what an intonation unit was and how to determine it. Whenever a difference of opinion occurred, a third transcriber was called in to resolve it.

Data analysis In order to determine how well the linguistic features that mark episode boundaries matched the episode boundaries of the frog story as identified by Bamberg and Marchman (1990), it was necessary to code each intonation unit according to which picture it described. The initial data analysis involved assigning each intonation unit to a picture of the story. Example (1) (book, English) is a relatively straightforward example of how this was done. (1)

here is a very special story about a boy named Tommy 1 and his best friend Spade Spade and Tommy found a frog __ Tommy and Spade really loved this frog at night Tommy and Spade went to bed in their usual places 2 Spade on top of Tommy now unknown to them __ the frog left that night 3 and when they woke up in the morning __ he was gone

Identifying intonation units was a relatively easy task when compared to the task of assigning each intonation unit to a picture in the story because some subjects did not closely follow the pictures in the order they were presented in the story. An example of a narrator straying from a close description of the pictures is as follows. In Example (2) (scroll, English), the narrator is describing picture 8 where the boy and the dog are heading into the woods.

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(2) _8a they ventured out into the backyard Timmy looked in the trees around the bushes ? under bushes in the trees and in the logs __ but he was nowhere to be found _8b he kept calling and calling and they kept going deeper into the woods Spot was barking at something in a tree _9_ while Timmy was looking in a hole The narrator begins in line 8a to set the scene for this picture. When she begins elaborating the ? section, it seems as though the entire story is being summarized. The bushes, the trees, and the logs are not shown in the story until Pictures 11, 14 and 19 respectively. The protagonist, Timmy, does not look into a tree until Picture 11. However, then the protagonists are going deeper into the woods (line 8b). In this case and others like it, because the questionable clauses are surrounded by the description of picture 8 and because the narrator ultimately continues with the story (8b), these clauses were assigned to picture 8. When a narrator decided to anticipate elements of the story line by summarizing actions across adjacent pictures, it was a challenge to assign the clauses that did not refer directly to any one picture. In Example (3) below (book, English), the narrator summarizes the actions of the protagonist in pictures 11–13 in the “?” section. However, the clauses do not apply to one particular picture more than any other. (3)

but there was no frog 10 only a critter came out and bit him on the nose (laughter) __ the little boy knew that the frog must not be in the hole (laughter) so the boy was still looking ? in the woods he looked everywhere __ but he still couldn’t find his little frog the little boy at one point gets up on a rock 14 and he thought __ wow maybe if I’m higher up the little frog can hear me

In this case and other similar cases, I assigned an average number to each picture that was summarized. Therefore, in this case, pictures 11, 12, and 13 received a value of one clause each. When narrators chose not to describe a picture in any way, a zero was entered for that picture in the analysis. Example (4) is an extremely short Japanese narrative told from a scroll.

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives

(4)

Masashikun wa bin no naka ni kaeru o katteimashita 1 Masashi (S) jar (POSS) inside (in) frog (DO) have (PAST) __ ‘Masashikun had a frog and kept it in a jar’ Aru yoru, kaeru wa sono bin kara nukedashiteshimaimashita 2 One night frog (S) that jar (from) escape (PAST) __ ‘One night, the frog escaped from the jar’ Masashikun wa asa okite kaeru ga nigedashitano ga 3 Masashi (S) morning wake up frog (S) escape (S) wakaru to realize __ ‘Masashikun realized the frog had escaped when he woke up’ inu to issyo ni kaeru o sagashi ni ikimashita 8 dog (and) together frog (DO) search (in) go (PAST) __ ‘Then he went out to look for the frog with his dog’ mori no naka o sagashiteru toki forest (POSS) inside (DO) search (PROG) time 12 ‘During the search in the forest’ Masashikun to inu wa hachi ni osowaretari hukurou Masashi (and) dog (S) bee (in) attack owl ni osowaretaishimashita (in) attacked (PAST) __ ‘Masashikun and his dog were attacked by bee and owl’ suruto soko ni kaeru no nakikoe ga kikoeta 19 then there (in) frog (POSS) voice (S) hear (PAST) __ ‘Then he heard the croak’ node mitemiru to 21 as look (and) __ ‘He looked around’ kaeru no oyakoto — kodomo ga soko ni imashita 23 frog (POSS) family — child (S) there (in) be (PAST) __ ‘At the time, there was a frog’s family’ Masahikun wa kodomo o ippiki moratte ie ni 24 Masashi (S) child (DO) one was given home (in) kaerimashita return (PAST) __ ‘Masashikun was given a child frog and went back to his house’

In this example, the search in the forest from picture 9 to picture 18 is summarized in only two intonation units. These two intonation units have been assigned to picture 12, because the narrator specifically mentions the attack by the bees and the owl, and picture 12 is the only picture in which both the bees and the owl appear. The other pictures between 12 and 19 (pictures 13–18) were coded as zeros for this narrative since the narrator chose not to describe them in any way.

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After the number of intonation units per picture was totaled for each picture in each story, additional linguistic features were counted. First, each picture in each story was analyzed as to whether each picture description contained any false starts or fronted adverbial clauses. Then, each of the main characters (the boy, the dog, and the frog) was traced through the story as to how it was mentioned in each picture according to the following categories: proper name, elaborated noun phrase, noun phrase (these three categories were later collapsed into one category called Direct Mention), pronoun, subject ellipsis, proper name, and non-subject mention. Examples and descriptions of each of these variables follow.

Definite mention Initially in the analysis, definite mention was separated into three categories, elaborated noun phrase, noun phrase, and proper name. However, when it was discovered that narrators tended to choose a type of definite reference and carry that through the stories, these three categories were collapsed into one called “definite mention.” Therefore, definite mention counts contain the combined counts for all three categories previously mentioned. – Noun phrase: In English, a noun phrase consists of a determiner and a noun. In Japanese, a noun phrase consists of a noun and a particle. (7) 22 the frog had had a wife (8) 17 shikakun wa kenchan to konta o ike ni otoshitedeer S Ken and konta DO pond (in) dropped‘The deer dropped Ken and Konta in the pond.’ Elaborated noun phrase: An elaborated noun phrase was any noun phrase larger than a basic noun phrase as it is defined for this study. (9) 2 (10) 1

the magic frog escaped from the jar shyounen no masashikun wa, kaeru no saburou to . . . S frog POS saburo and boy POS masashi ‘The boy named Masashi (had) a frog named Saburo and . . .’

Proper name: The category of proper name includes all instances when the narrator refers to any character in the story by a name assigned by that narrator, and this name in subject position of main clauses. (11) 2

Tommy got out of the jar and ran away

(12) 7

genki wa daijyobu deshita genki S okay be (PAST) ‘Genki was okay.’

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives

Pronoun mention This category includes all instances when the characters in the story were referred to in pronoun form in subject position of main clauses. The pronoun,“they” was coded as a pronoun mention in both of the referents’ categories. (13) 14 but he didn’t know there was a giant deer sitting behind the rock (14) 2

aru ban kare ga nemuri ni hairu to . . . one night he S sleep (in) enter (and) ‘One night, he begins to sleep . . . ‘

Subject ellipsis (zero mention) The subject ellipsis category included instances where the narrator did not use an overt marking for the subject of a verb. (15) 6

The dog set on the window the jar on his head (the dog) slipped and fell out

(16) 5

mado o akete soto o mitemimashita ga sore demo imasen window DO open outside DO looked but there also is not ‘(Boy) opened the window, looked outside, but (frog) wasn’t there.’

Non-subject mention In this category, I traced all mentions of the characters when those mentions did not occur in subject position. (17) 5

and Edward only cares about Jumpy

(18) 5

maku wa mado kara kaeru o yobimashita maku S window from frog DO call (PAST) ‘Mike called the frog from the window.’

As previously mentioned, numerous researchers have demonstrated that the linguistic devices chosen for this study mark shifts of consciousness and the beginnings of episodes. One of the goals of this research was to determine the extent to which previously identified linguistic devices which mark beginnings correlate with the intuited beginnings identified by Bamberg and Marchman (1990). In my study, I coded the beginnings of episodes in the same place as Bamberg and Marchman (Pictures 4, 8, 11, 14, 19). Then, I coded the endings of the episodes as the picture description directly prior to those beginnings (Pictures 7, 10, 13, 18). Any picture that lay in between a beginning and an ending was coded as continuation (middle) (Pictures 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21). This coding resulted in a different organization of the frog story than the one proposed by Bamberg and Marchman even though the beginnings of the episodes were coded at the same pictures. A Multifactoral ANOVA was run on each of the dependent variables: format

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(Book/scroll), language (Japanese/English), picture number and episode category. In addition, these variables’ means and standard deviations were compared and analyzed.

Results In this section, I will discuss the results of the statistical measures used in this research. Although interesting features occurred in relation to Japanese and English separately, the remainder of this chapter will discuss where the two languages converged rather than diverged in the occurrence of linguistic devices to mark episode boundaries.

Episode variation across languages The majority of the linguistic devices investigated in this study were found to be significant in relation to episode position, specifically in relation to episode boundaries. Table 1 shows the eight dependent variables which demonstated significance with regard to their episodic position. However until each variable was examined individually, the specific nature of that significance was unclear. These eight variables may give insight into the interplay of perception and production of the frog story, or each variable may be significant in each language for purely linguistic or typological reasons. A closer examination of these relationships was necessary to dispel speculation. Table 1. Significance variables in Japanese and English with regard to episode Dependent variable Intonation units Fronted adverbial clauses Boy

Total definite mention Pronoun mention Subject ellipsis

Dog

Total definite mention

Frog

Total definite mention Non-subject mention

The figures that follow plot the means for each variable by language and location in the episode in order to elaborate what is happening with each linguistic device within the episode.

Means

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

English Japanese

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 1. Intonation unit occurrence

Intonation units Figure 1 shows the intonation unit means as they relate to location in the episode. From the chart, we can see that there are more intonation units used in English than in Japanese; however the pattern of the means is similar. The beginnings of episodes are marked by narrators with a higher number of intonation units in each language, while the middles and the ends of episodes have similar means in each language. Fronted adverbial clauses A similar pattern can be seen in an examination of the occurrence of fronted adverbial clauses, which were hypothesized to be an indicator of a shift of scene, and perhaps consciousness. For this variable, only instances where the adverbial clause occurred prior to the main clause describing the picture were counted. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Billy

(6) 2

aru ban ryokun to genki ga neteiru aida ni kerochan waone night ryokun and genki S sleeping during (in) frog S ‘One night while Ryokun and Genki were sleeping, the frog . . . .’

Means

(5) 1

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

English Japanese

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 2. Fronted adverbial clause occurrence

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In Figure 2, again the patterns are the same across the two languages. In both languages, fronted adverbial clauses occur with much greater frequency at the beginning of a episode than at the middle or the end. Again, middles and ends have similar means. For the remainder of this section, I will shown the results for each of the characters in the story separately. First, the boy character, then the dog and finally the frog will be examined. Each character reference was traced through the story and coded for each picture as definite mention, pronoun mention, non-subject mention or with subject ellipsis.

Means

The Boy character The second group of charts shows reference trends for the boy’s character in both Japanese and English. The boy character demonstrated significance in three of the four variables that were counted: definite mentions, pronoun mentions, and subject ellipsis. Neither the dog or the frog demonstrated the same pattern of significance with these variables. Figure 3 shows the results for the definite mentions of the boy character. Definite mentions were a combination of the noun phrase, elaborated noun phrase, and proper name categories. These were combined due to the tendency of narrators to choose one format (i.e. proper name) continue that reference throughout the story. Figure 4 shows the occurrence for pronoun mentions of the boy character. 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Japanese

English

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 3. Boy — definite mention occurrence

Means

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0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

English Japanese

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 4. Boy — pronoun mention occurrence

Means

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 0.30 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0

Japanese

English

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 5. Boy — subject ellipsis occurrence

Figures 3 and 4 both demonstrate that the beginnings of episodes are marked with more reference to the boy with both definite and pronoun reference. Research has shown that human protagonists are more salient than animals (Tomlin 1987, 1989; Fillmore 1977). Narrators telling the frog story seem to be using the boy character to reorient the action and set up the new episode. Middles and ends demonstrate a similar pattern to that already demonstrated. The other variable related to the boy character is Subject Ellipsis (Figure 5). As expected, Japanese demonstrates a much higher occurrence of subject ellipsis than English. This is, of course, due to a linguistic constraint of English which does not typically allow much freedom for understood subjects. In Japanese, narrators need not restate the subject of the utterance if it is understood. An interesting point to this argument is that if that is the case, then perhaps we could expect a greater frequency of subject ellipsis in the middle and end locations of the episode rather than the beginnings, since narrators are supposed to reset the stage at the beginning of a new episode. However, Japanese speakers do not need to restate the subject of the action if they can assume that the actions of the protagonist are purely human actions and thus could not be attributed to an animal. In this case, they can still refrain from overtly mentioning the subject because it is understood. (Clancy 1980a, Clancy 1980b). The Dog character The dog character demonstrated significance with only one variable, definite mentions (Figure 6). Across languages, narrators seem to be mentioning the dog character with similar frequency in either a beginning or a middle location of the episode. The end of the episode is marked with a sharp decrease in the occurrence of definite mentions of the dog character. Secondly, this variable is the only one to demonstrate significance across languages for the dog, as compared to the four significant variables for the boy character. This is an especially interesting phenomenon when we consider that at many times in the story, the boy and the dog characters act together and at other places, they act completely separately, each having distinctly different actions which require elaboration. A comparison of Figures 3, 4, and 5 to Figure 6 seems to show that animal protagonists are not as salient as human ones.

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240 Mary Seig 0.45 4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0

Japanese

English

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 6. Dog — definite mention occurrence

Means

The Frog character Two of the dependent variables for the frog character were significant with relation to episode: definite mentions (Figure 7) and non-subject mentions (Figure 8). In both cases, the beginnings and the endings of episodes show a marked increase in these mentions. As can be seen from Figures 7 and 8, the pattern within episodes changes when narrators refer to the frog. Instead of a high number of mentions in the beginning locations and a similar mean for the middle and end locations, narrators are indicating the search for the frog at both the beginnings and the endings of the episodes. Japanese speakers encode this referent more often than English speakers. Example (19) (an English book narrator) demonstrates the pattern of occurrence in both Japanese and English. The middle location (M) is marked by a distinct drop in the mean for both variables. For the pictures that were coded as middles or continuations, generally narrators refrained from mentioning the frog in any way as is shown in Example (19) for picture number 6. At the beginnings of episodes (B) (pictures 4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0

Japanese

English

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 7. Frog — definite mention occurrence

Means

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Japanese English

Beginning

Middle

End

Episode location Figure 8. Frog — non-subject mention occurrence

and 8), the narrators are marking the reinstantiation of the search for the frog. At the ends of episodes (E) (picture 7) narrators are reporting the lack of finding the frog. Hence the increases in the means in the beginning and ending locations. (19) 4 (B)

he and the dog went searching throughout the entire room trying to find it during while the dog got his nose stuck in the jar 6 (M) then he (the dog) fell out of the window 7 the boy rescued the dog (E) but they still couldn’t find the frog 8 so they went into the woods (B) searching trying to find his frog

Episode summary. Tomlin (1987) argues strongly for an episodic (attention driven) approach to narrative. However, he argues that this approach lacks “explicit and structure-independent means” of identifying episodic boundaries. This study has demonstrated that episode boundaries are marked by a number of linguistic devices, not simply noun or pronoun reference. The current research has not found that one specific device does or does not mark an episode boundary. Instead, there is a collocation that occurs at episode boundaries, which interrelatedly marks that boundary across languages and formats. As was seen by the figures, eight linguistic devices, which were counted in this study, give an indication of the boundaries of episodes. Beginnings of episodes are marked by an increased number of : – – – – –

intonation units per picture; fronted adverbial clauses; definite mentions of the Boy, Dog, and Frog characters; pronoun mentions of the boy character; the middles of episodes seem to marked by sharp decreases in the above variables.

The endings of episodes are marked only by an increase in the number of:

24

242 Mary Seig

– definite mentions of the Frog; – non-subject mentions of the Frog.

Format variation across languages When narrators tell the frog story from either book or scroll format, they are faced with a number of choices. In the books, the pictures are artificially segmented into groups of one or two pictures surrounded by a page boundary. In the scroll format, narrators could see up to eight or nine pictures at a time. Initially, it was hypothesized that this difference in format would result in some sort of change in the narratives that were produced. Across both Japanese and English narrators, the only variable for which the scroll and book format differed significantly was the number of intonation units. In English, the narrators telling the stories from the book form (mean = 2.87, SD = 2.13) had more intonation units than those using the scroll form (mean = 2.62, SD = 2.13) This variation can easily be seen from Examples (20) and (21). Example (20) gives an English-speaking male’s description of the action in picture 8 when using the book format. Example (21) gives a description of the same picture by an English speaker who used the scroll format to tell the story. (20) Johnny and Spot ran outran down through the woods hollering — calling the frog’s name he was nowhere to be found they searched and searched (21) so they decided to both head out to the woods behind the house to see if they could find Kermit As these examples suggest, English book narrators on the whole used more language to describe the pictures than the scroll narrators. Japanese speakers, like English speakers, used significantly more intonation units when they told stories in the book format (Mean 2.20; SD 1.92) than in the scroll format (Mean 1.74; SD 1.34). An example of an extremely short scroll case has already been shown in Example (4). Example (22) shows a portion of a book story. (22) 4

syounen wa heya no iroirona tokoro o sagashitemimashita boy (S) room (POSS) every place (DO) search see (PAST) ‘The boy tried to look all over his room’ demo kaeru wa mitsudarimasen but frog (S) find (NEG) ‘but the frog couldn’t be found’ inu mo issyo ni sagashimashita dog (also) together search (PAST)

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives

‘The dog tried to look with the boy’ inu wa bin no naka ni kaeru ga inaika 4 dog (S) jar (POSS) inside (in) frog (S) be (NEG) because bin no naka ni atama o irete sagashitemimashita jar (POSS) inside (in) head (DO) into search (PAST) ‘The dog put his head in the bottle that the frog wasn’t in.’ demo kaeru wa mitsukarimasen but frog (S) find (NEG) ‘but (the dog) could not find the frog’ soshite inu wa bin no naka kara nukedasu koto mo then dog (S) jar (POSS) inside (from) sneak thing (also) dekimasen do (NEG) __ ‘then the dog cannot take the jar off of his head.’ syounen mado no soto o mitemimashita boy window (POSS) outside (DO) look (PAST) ‘then the boy looked out of the window to search’ 5 ie no soto ni nigedashitaka mo — house (POSS) outside (in) run away (also) ‘outside the house run away —’ kaeru wa ie no soto ni nigedashitakamoshiremasen frog (S) house (POSS) outside (in) run away (also) know (NEG) __ ‘The frog may have run away outside’ inu wa mado kara soto ni tobiorimashita 6 dog (S) window (from) outside (in) fall (PAST) __ ‘the dog fell out of the window’ A comparison of Examples (4) and (22) clearly demonstrates that book narrators use significantly more intonation units in their stories than the scroll narrators. Although both Japanese- and English-speaking narrators used more intonation units in the books than the scroll form, there is a possibility that there may be a difference in the length of the intonation units themselves. Therefore a second measure of narrative length, the number of words per narrative was calculated. Table 2 shows the results of this count. English speakers, on average, used more words than Japanese speakers. Across languages, book stories had more words than scroll stories, but English scrolls (even though less than English books) had more words than either Japanese books or scrolls. This table supports the previous findings for intonation units. A further analysis of the breakdown of intonation units per picture across formats, Table 3, elaborates the nature of that significance. This additional analysis will elaborate the nature of variation across languages and formats with respect to the variation that occurred at episode boundaries. However, by examining Table 3 (where pictures marking the beginnings of episodes are identified in boldface type),

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244 Mary Seig Table 2. Word counts as related to independent variables Total words

Average per story

English

book scroll

13,202 12,297

528.08 491.88

Japanese

book scroll

10,714 8,568

428.56 342.72

we can see that although the number of intonation units had a significant relationship to format and episode across languages, the relationship between the number of intonation units and the boundaries of the episodes is not so clear-cut. When we examine the five pictures that mark the beginnings of the episodes, we do not necessarily see that those picture descriptions have the greatest number of intonation units. Even Picture 4, a very strong indicator in both formats of the English stories and the Japanese book format, has one fewer intonation unit that Picture 5 in the Japanese scroll stories. Based upon the previous research regarding episodes and the findings outlined previously, a general expectation for an episode contour could be that the number of intonation units would peak at the pictures that mark beginnings of episodes and gradually decrease through the episode until the end. Therefore, the picture immediately preceding an episode boundary picture should contain fewer intonation units than the episode boundary picture, and the episode boundary picture should contain more intonation units than the picture immediately following it (as is the case with Episode 1 of the English Books, beginning at Picture 4). However, the data in Table 3 paints a much murkier picture. From the data in Table 3, we can draw a number of conclusions regarding the occurrence of the typical pattern across formats. First, picture 11, Episode 3 is problematic across formats. Either the number of intonation units between picture 11 and 12 is closely comparable (as in the English books and Japanese scrolls) or picture 12 has a greater number of intonation units than picture 11 as in the English scrolls and the Japanese books. This could be related to the fact that picture 12 is a double picture in the story. However, this effect cannot be only related to the prominence afforded a double picture because picture 8 is also a double picture but is not problematic across all formats. However, the content of the pictures could be having an effect. In picture 12, the boy and the dog are doing different things simultaneously. In addition, they are each meeting other animals in this picture. The boy is meeting the mole, and the dog is meeting the bees. In picture 8, there is much less happening, and the boy and the dog are acting in unison. These perceptual features could be playing a role in the fuzziness of the episode boundaries at these points. Episode 1, beginning at picture 4, is the only episode which follows the typical pattern across formats (although the pattern is very weak in the Japanese scrolls).

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives

However, the remaining episode boundaries are much more fluid. This pattern is easy to see from the graph in Figure 5.9. Although picture 4 shows only a slight increase in picture 4 in the Japanese scrolls, the other groups show sharp spikes in number of intonation units. The remaining boundaries tend to have a pattern of increase toward an episode beginning; however, the increase does not always peak at the picture coded as the episode boundary. This fluidity is especially evident in the scroll stories perhaps because of the lack of page boundaries restricting centers of interest to smaller sections of the story. Although the summary statistics show that there is an increase in the number of intonation units at the beginnings of episodes, it is not clear that an increase in IUs always marks an episode beginning. The number of IUs is not in and of itself a sufficient marker of episode boundary. It combines with features which must cluster to identify a boundary. Table 3. Intonation unit count and percentage by language and format English

Japanese

Picture

Book N

%

Scroll N

%

Book N

%

Scroll N

%

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

118 84 63 138 75 25 55 69 77 78 96 99 48 77 70 51 65 44 68 50 39 53 53 128

7 5 4 8 4 1 3 4 4 5 6 6 3 4 4 3 4 3 4 3 2 3 3 7

101 88 43 113 64 26 49 95 85 54 59 93 46 89 59 48 58 28 74 43 32 59 53 116

6 6 3 7 4 2 3 6 5 3 4 6 3 6 4 3 4 2 5 3 2 4 3 7

48 33 61 79 52 49 39 41 34 40 59 80 64 56 56 38 56 50 39 34 59 61 82 108

4 3 5 6 4 4 3 3 3 3 4 6 5 4 4 3 4 4 3 3 4 5 6 8

86 46 44 49 50 19 41 38 55 41 58 59 29 54 39 32 38 39 39 24 14 36 43 71

8 4 4 5 5 2 4 4 5 4 6 6 3 5 4 3 4 4 4 2 1 3 4 7

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Format Summary. When narrators tell the frog story from either book or scroll format, they are faced with a number of choices. In the books, the pictures are artificially segmented into groups of one or two pictures surrounded by a page boundary. In the scroll format, narrators could see up to eight or nine pictures at a time. Both Japanese and English speaking narrators use more intonation units and more language in the book format as opposed to the scroll format. Since narrators telling the stories in scroll format can see more of the story as they are telling it, this enables them to focus on the pictures in different ways from the book format, hence resulting in more fluidity in the boundaries of episodes. This feature implies a difference in the perception of the story when the format changes. Chafe (1988) has outlined a view of introverted and extroverted consciousness which illuminates the trends found in this data set.

Discussion The current study investigated the episodic structure of narrative from perceptual and typological perspectives. First, the episodic stucture of narrative was tested against previous research which has identified the linguistic devices which mark episode boundaries. These linguistic devices were then compared across two languages, Japanese and English. Finally, a comparison of the occurrence of those devices was completed across two perceptually different formats.

Evidence of episodic structure Using previously identified linguistic devices to analyze the Japanese and English narratives in my study, my study contributes evidence that the linguistic markers investigated mark the episode boundaries identified by Bamberg and Marchman (1990).One additional linguistic device, which had not previously been quantified, the use of fronted adverbial clauses, was also found to mark episode boundaries. These fronted adverbial clauses were often used to set the stage for the change of action that occurs in a new episode. Initially, an increase in the number of intonation units was hypothesized to indicate the beginning of an episode. Although on average the number of intonation units was higher for pictures coded as beginnings than for those coded as middles or endings, when the analyses were complete, intonation units were not as strong an indicator of episode marking as originally thought. When the number of intonation units was counted for each picture and totaled for each group, only Picture 4, the beginning of episode 1, had an increase in the number of intonation units across both languages and formats. Picture 4 seems to have a special status because it is setting the stage for the remainder of the story. Because the number of intonation units at episode boundaries may not always increase, the number of intonation units cannot, in and of itself, be used to determine the beginning of an episode.

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 247

Reference to the main protagonists of the story played an important role in the identification of episode boundaries. The boy character was actually the most fruitful in terms of the number of significant relationships found by reference to his character. Both Japanese and American narrators use definite mentions at the beginning of an episode to renew the topic and reshape the episode. Japanese speakers have more subject ellipsis of the boy due to the typological constraints of their language; however, English has a strong head-initial tendency which influenced the use of pronouns in the English stories. The dog character was significant with only one variable, definite mentions. The trend in that significance was very different from the boy character in that the dog character is almost equally likely to be mentioned in any episodic position. This may be an interaction of the small increase in language at the ends of episodes, the overall salience of the boy as a human protagonist, and the tendency of narrators to mention the search for the frog as an episode was ending. For the frog character, definite mentions and pronoun mentions increased at the beginnings of episodes and decreased in the middles. In addition, two variables, definite mentions and non-subject mentions, increased at the ends of episodes. Directly prior to the beginning of a new episode, narrators mentioned the frog in a reference to the goal of the story. Narrators summed up the actions of the episode with a mention of the character that motivated those actions.

Typological variation The two languages under investigation in this study were chosen for their typological differences. It was hypothesized that these typological differences would have a bearing on how the narrators conceptualize and consequently tell the frog story (Slobin 1996). In general, narrators in the two languages supported this hypothesis in that linguistic markers were used to varying degrees to mark episode boundaries. As expected, Japanese narrators used pronoun mentions less, and ellipsis more, than English-speaking narrators did. English speakers, of course, had more reference in subject position due to the strong head-initial tendency in English. Generally, the typological differences between the two languages were manifested in the data in highly predictable ways. There were also some surprising similarities across languages. One of the analyses completed on the variables was a percentage-per-picture and a ratio of occurrence. In the variables, the number of intonation units and fronted adverbial clauses, very similar percentages and ratios were found. This finding indicates that irrespective of language, certain segmentations of experience are perceived similarly; however those experiences when coded in language may manifest themselves similarly or differently depending upon the linguistic devices available in the language. This finding parallels nicely with the “thinking for speaking” theory proposed by Slobin, in which he argues that the linguistic devices available to a speaker of a language influence the way that the speaker encodes an experience.

248 Mary Seig

Perceptual variation One major intention of this research project was to demonstrate that the format of the story changes the perception of the story in linguistically quantifiable ways. It was originally hypothesized that the when the narrators could view a series of pictures at a time, the episode boundaries would change. So, for example, instead of having five episodes as in the book format, narrators would segment the 24 pictures of the story in different places resulting in a different number of episodes (perhaps fewer, perhaps more). In the picture-by-picture analysis of the intonation unit data, it seems that Japanese book and scroll narrators are segmenting the pictures differently from the English-speaking narrators. Across formats, Japanese narrators veer from the typical episode pattern more often than the English narrators. And across languages, the scroll narrators seem to have some fluidity to the boundaries of their episodes which is not found specifically in the English books. In general, across languages, scroll stories were shorter with fewer intonation units and fewer words. Although the narrators used less language in the scroll stories, the percentage of that language allotted to each picture did not change when compared to the book stories across languages. This finding has implications related to the activation of extroverted and introverted consciousness (Chafe 1994). English- and Japanese-speaking narrators use more intonation units and more words in the book format as opposed to the scroll format. Narrators telling the stories in scroll format can see more of the story as they are telling it. In much the same way as Chafe’s discussion of extroverted consciousness where speakers must segment experience to describe it, scroll narrators have a wealth of detail to choose from and must segment the pictures in some way. Because they have a larger portion of the narrative to perceive, their perception is more selectively focussed and less detailed, resulting in less language. The scroll narrators are experiencing the pictures of the story very differently from the book narrators. Book narrators already have a segmentation of the story because of the page boundaries, which require them to focus on one or two pictures at a time. They must remember the story from one page to the next, and move the story along. Book narrators generally focus on more detailed descriptions of the actions in the pictures because the segmentation encourages them to do so. Hence, the book narrators use more language to describe the pictures than scroll narrators. If we accept that the experience of telling the frog story in the scroll format encourages narrators to use features related to extroverted consciousness, and that the book format more closely parallels introverted consciousness, then we can compare the findings related to format in light of Chafe’s theory. The book stories have already been segmented into page boundary groups. These groups require the narrators to focus specifically on the actions shown in those pictures. We would expect the resulting stories to contain more detail regarding those actions. In this section, we have seen that narrators, who tell the frog story in book form, provide that detail through a higher number of intonation units, more definite mentions of the boy,

Episodic boundaries in Japanese and English narratives 249

and more pronoun mentions of the boy and the dog than narrators using the scroll form. The scroll format allows narrators to see a larger portion of the story at one time. This lack of segmentation of the story requires the narrators to segment the pictures themselves. There is a cognitive cost to this segmentation in that, as narrators are viewing a larger group of pictures, the detail within each picture is lessened.

References Bamberg, Michael and Marchman, Virginia 1990. “What holds narrative together? The linguistic encoding of episode boundaries.” In IprA Papers in Pragmatics, 4(1/2), 58–121. Bates, E. and Devescovi, A. 1989. “Crosslinguistic studies of sentence production.” In B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing, 225– 253. New York: Cambridge University Press. Berman Ruth A. and Slobin, Dan. 1994. Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Chafe, Wallace. 1979. “The flow of thought and the flow of language.” In T. Givon (ed.), Discourse and Syntax. New York: Academic Press. Chafe, Wallace. 1988. “Linking intonation units in spoken English.” In J. Haiman and S. Thompson (eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins. Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chafe, Wallace. (ed.) 1980. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace 1980. “The deployment of consciousness in the production of narrative.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 9–50. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Clancy, P. M. 1980a. “Referential choice in English and Japanese narrative discourse.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 127–201. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Clancy, P. M. 1980b. “Written and spoken style in Japanese narratives.” In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring orality and literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Downing, P. 1980.“Factors influencing lexical choice in narrative.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 89–126. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. Du Bois, J.W. 1980.“Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 203–274. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. Fillmore, C. J. 1977. “The case for case reopened.” In P. Cole and J. Sadock (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 8: Grammatical Relations. New York: Academic Press. Mayer, M. 1969. Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press. Peterson, C. and McCabe, A. 1983. Developmental Psycholinguisitcs: Three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. New York: Plenum Press. Slobin, Dan. 1995. Lecture notes: Crosslinguistic narrative study. Albuquerque, NM: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

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Mary Seig Slobin, Dan 1996. “From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’.” In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sridhar, S. N. 1989. “Cognitive structures in language production: A crosslinguistic study.” In B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (eds.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing, 209–224. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stein, N. and Glenn, C. 1979. “An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children.” In R. Freedle (ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, Deborah. 1980. “A comparative analysis of oral narrative strategies: Athenian Greek and American English.” In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production 51–87. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. Tomlin, R. S. 1983. “On the interaction of syntactic subject, thematic information, and agent in English.” Journal of Pragmatics 7: 411– 432. Tomlin, R. S. 1987.“Linguistic reflections of cognitive events.” In R. S. Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

CHAPTER 14

Rhetorical influences As Latin was, English is? William G. Eggington Brigham Young University

Introduction Due to factors including key historical events and the powerful economic momentums of Great Britain and the United States of America, the English language has emerged as the world’s language of wider dissemination in most fields of crosslinguistic, international communication including scientific discourse communities (Pennycook 1994; Fishman et al. 1975). As illustration, consider the biological sciences publishing 86% of their materials in 1981 in English (a gain of 11% since 1965). Similarly, this trend is occurring in physics (85% — a gain of 12% since 1965), medicine (73% — a gain of 22% since 1965) and most other modern sciences (Swales 1985: 2). Recently, the British Council commissioned a study on the future of English (Graddol 1997). The report commences with an overview of the present status of the language by providing a wealth of interesting data. For example, the major international domains of English are listed in Table 1. Using a model consisting of demographic, human development and economic data, the “engco” model, the report calculates the 1995 global influence of English as shown in Table 2. Table 1. Major international domains of English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Working language of international organizations and conferences Scientific publication International banking, economic affairs and trade Advertising for global brands Audio-visual cultural products (e.g. film, TV, popular music) International tourism Tertiary education International safety (e.g. ‘airspeak,’ ‘seaspeak’) International law As a ‘relay language’ in interpretation and translation Technology transfer Internet communication

Source: Graddol (1997: 8)

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William G. Eggington Table 2. ‘Global influence’ of major languages according to the “engco” model 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

English German French Japanese Spanish Chinese Arabic Portuguese Malay Russian

100 42 33 32 31 22 8 5 4 3

Note: An index score of 100 represents the position of English in 1995 Source: Graddol (1997: 59)

Other interesting data from the report include items such as 84.3% of World Wide Web pages are in English; English is the working language of the European Union, the teaching of English as a second or foreign language is a $10 billion a year industry. All this data conclusively leads to the assumption that if an individual or group wishes to gain access or contribute to a substantial portion of the world’s current scientific knowledge, English becomes the key to unlocking that information storage and retrieval system. In sum, it is an understatement to suggest that the English language continues to play a significant role within international scientific and technological discourse communities. There are historical parallels to the rise of languages of wider communication. Latin, for example, occupied a similar, albeit narrower, status commencing approximately 2,000 years ago and lasting until modern times. The residual effect of Latin’s linguistic dominance is still felt today in formal registers and scientific lexicons, the retention of key Latin morphemes as well as Latin influenced rhetorics. Recently, however, the power of the English language has even managed to displace Latin’s “naming” preeminence in the scientific terminology domain. As evidence of this fact, turn to the newest scientific and technological terms; they are created using English-based lexical and phonological features, regardless of the native language of those researchers and developers who have conducted the research or initiated the development (Radd 1989). Preliminary research indicates that the effect of the English language on international discourse and speech communities is beginning to parallel Latin’s influence in ways other than word coinage. In essence, trends suggest that, in certain genres, as Latin was in classical and medieval times, English is becoming. The purpose of this chapter is to address one aspect of this claim with respect to rhetorical patterns by examining the following three sub-claims:

Rhetorical influences

1. Various world scientific discourse communities are developing standardized forms of rhetorical patterning, regardless of the cultural influences on the languages functioning within these speech communities. 2. The predominant cultural and linguistic influence on these rhetorical patterns is derived from Western, English-based rhetorical preferences. 3. Some “drift” toward a preference for English-influenced rhetorical patterns is evident in rhetorical patterns in other languages even though the English structures violate linguistic and cultural conventions in the other languages. After further developing these sub-claims, the remainder of this chapter will attempt to support them by relying on: 1. historical precedent; 2. the process of normative standards in written discourse communities; 3. emerging data.

Rhetorical patterning, language and culture Commencing with Kaplan’s work in 1966 (Kaplan 1966), some linguists have continued investigating the notion that people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds prefer to develop extended meaning in different ways. As Connor (1996: 9) and Grabe and Kaplan (1996: 200) indicate, these specific patterns appear to be influenced by various factors including cultural and sociolinguistic dimensions within particular speech communities, definitions of audience, the function of literacy, educational processes and ideologies, discourse and genre typologies, composing conventions, as well as mechanisms for creating coherence within texts. As Kaplan (1966; 1972; 1987) has demonstrated, cross-cultural patterns are evident in written texts as well as in speech. He concludes that, while numerous forms of developing meaning are available to all languages, each language exhibits clear preferences as to the presentation of that meaning. As Kaplan states, there are: Important differences between languages in the way in which discourse topic is identified in a text and the way which discourse topic is developed in terms of exemplification, definition and so on (1987: 10).

Or, with respect to the cultural dimension, as Clyne suggests: it is the cultural value system that determines whether, to a particular group, directness is vulgar or indirectness is devious . . . whether a letter should come to the point immediately or gradually build up to the central speech act . . . whether linearity in discourse is seen as the only logical or comprehensible structure, or whether it is felt to curb exhaustive discussion. (Clyne 1985: 14)

As an example, for the English language, Lautamatti has examined the relationship between discourse topic and sub-topics. She explains that topic develops:

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William G. Eggington in terms of succession of hierarchically ordered sub-topics, each of which contributes to the discourse topic, and is treated as a sequence of ideas, expressed in the written language as sentences (1987: 87).

Topical progression in English scientific and technological written discourse comes about generally through two types of sub-topic development: 1. parallel progression where the sub-topic in a series of sentences is the same; 2. sequential progression where the topic of a sentence is provided by the predicate of the preceding sentence. Moreover, it appears that the native reader of English scientific prose expects that there is a hierarchical progression of topic and a “direct and uninterrupted flow of information: (Kaplan 1987: 10). Consequently, parallel and sequential topical progression must add to the topic within a narrow set of parameters seldom, if ever, digressing from the stated, clearly defined topic. However, textual analysis of texts written in many languages other than English has shown that the above-described narrow, linear development of topic has not been a language universal (See Connor 1996 for a thorough review of these findings). Some academic texts in German (Clyne 1984), Brazilian Portuguese (DantasWhitney and Grabe 1989), Korean (Eggington 1987), Japanese (Hinds 1980 1987), Hindi (Kachru 1988), Mandarin (Tsao 1984) and Hebrew (Zellermayer 1988) develop topic in ways other than those expected by native English readers. For example, Eggington (1987) shows how Korean cultural emphases on humility and indirectness in communication prohibits some academics from expressing their hypothesis at the commencement of their discourse for fear of appearing to be arrogant. Rather, a clear statement of topic and rhetorical intent either is absent, or is buried in the text and only briefly mentioned. In addition, many Korean academic writers develop topic not in the preferred linear style common to English academic writing, but rather in a fashion based upon classical Chinese poetry where the argument is vaguely introduced by reference to a series of tangential examples; the argument is developed in terms of what it is not rather than what it is; there is an abrupt change in topic with a focus on sub-themes to the argument; and finally a quick conclusion is reached. Based upon a host of research findings, it is clear that text development is dependent upon socio-cultural and linguistic factors. However, with respect to the Korean language, Eggington also shows that: Another rhetorical style is evident when one surveys Korean academic journals of the type written in Korean and English and especially when one concentrates on articles written by those authors who publish in both Korean and English and have earned academic degrees in English-speaking countries. (Eggington 1987: 157)

Eggington continues this line of research by suggesting that “the academic rhetorical patterns of the world are adjusting to fit a linear style” (Eggington 1987: 159). Clyne (1984, 1981) also comes to this conclusion with reference to German. He states that:

Rhetorical influences There appear to be some disciplines (e.g., mathematics, engineering) in which German scientists have adopted a basically linear discourse structure. This may be conditioned by the discipline or by leadership in the discipline of English speakers. In other fields of science (e.g., chemistry), the non-linear structure is quite common in German. (Clyne 1981: 64)

Most recently, Biber and Finegan (1989) and Atkinson (1991) have shown that the preferred rhetorical patterns of the English language in many written genres have “drifted” over a two hundred year period to form those styles which are presently accepted. Atkinson has shown how the rhetorical style of the oldest scientific journal still being published, the Edinburgh Medical Journal, has changed significantly since 1735. These changes are broadly attributed to the changing nature of the scientific speech community and the subject matter. If stylistic drift occurred in English over time, it is a defensible position to suggest that drift is proceeding in certain genres of other languages as well, and, as I hope to show, this drift is influenced by English rhetorical patterns. Thus we have the situation graphically represented in Figure 1. This figure represents variation within a given international discourse community where a community-specific standard English is the vehicle of communication and where discourse schemata are developed in contexts external to the socio-cultural schema of most non-native English speakers — thus an exo-normative standard. On the other hand, an endo-normative standard exists for L1 and nativized English contexts. More often than not, this endo-normative standard exists within a bi- or multi-lingual context and exhibits far greater tolerance for sentence level and discourse variation than allowed in international discourse community English contexts. As the following discussion will show, there appears to be evidence suggesting that the norms of the academic field-specific discourse community are influencing the English and L1 discourse styles of many non-English speech communities. As mentioned above, this general claim will be supported by reliance on historical precedent, the process of normative standards in written discourse communities, and emerging data.

Historical precedent In written rhetorical history there are at least two languages which have shared some parallels to the present day role of English: Latin and Classical Chinese. The Latin influence on the development of English rhetorical patterns has been well documented. Millward (1996: 282) shows that the preferred pattern of topical development during the Middle English period involved the placing of ideas in a paratactic or side-by-side progression. Thus: But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kinds for my sake, for a testimony against them. (Bible, IJV. Mark 13: 9)

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William G. Eggington International discourse commmunity (Exo-normative based on Standard English)

Standard English influence causing “drift” in nativized Englishes (and perhaps in L1s)

National speech communities (Endo-normative) Tolerance for variation from norm

Various international Englishes Figure 1. Discourse community influences on national varieties (developed from Kachru’s discussion of language standards (Kachru 1990: 95)

However, scholars during this period gained much of their knowledge through the study and translation of Latin texts, as Latin was the language of wider communication for intellectual activities. Consequently, when scholars wished to write in an academic style, they preferred the Latin hypotactic tradition which involved considerable subordination of ideas. For example, the “scholars” who produced the King James Version of the Bible retained the paratactic patterns from previous translations for the actual scriptures as in the example above. However, when producing the dedication for the Bible, they felt compelled to write in the Latin hypotactic patterns. Thus: So that if, on the one side, we shall be traduced by Popish persons at home or abroad, who therefore will malign us, because we are poor instruments to make God’s holy truth to be yet more and more known to the people, whom they desire still to keep in ignorance and darkness; or if, on the other side . . . (Bible, KJV — Dedication)

This Latin rhetorical influence continues to the present time as a preferred pattern for most academic written discourse. Similarly, Hinds (1982) for Japanese and Eggington (1987) for Korean have both found evidence of the influence of Classical Chinese scholarship on the written rhetorical styles preferred by Japanese and Korean academics. If traditional discourse patterns for Middle English, Japanese, and Korean were influenced by the major academic language of their temporal and physical contexts, it is not difficult to conclude that some rhetorical patterns of contemporary languages have been influenced by today’s major academic language, the English language.

Rhetorical influences

The process of normative standards in written discourse communities Swales (1990: 65) suggests that the “jury is still out” on what he labels as “universalist tendencies in research genres,” although he does acknowledge the existence of “invisible colleges” and of “transnational discourse communities” (his terms). Swales also labels Widdowson’s comments on this matter as the “strong form of the universalist hypothesis,” or, to quote Widdowson, Scientific exposition . . . structured according to certain patterns which, with some tolerance for individual stylistic variation, imposes a conformity on members of the scientific community no matter what language they happen to use. (Widdowson 1979: 61) The discourse community concept, as a socio-rhetorical construct, offers some general illumination of the difficult and important question of academic language variation across culture and generations. (Swales 1990: 67)

I agree with Swales’s distinction between a speech community and a discourse community where the predominant focus of a speech community is socialization or group solidarity whereas: in a socio-rhetorical discourse community, the primary determinants of linguistic behavior are functional, since a discourse community consists of a group of people who linkup in order to pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity. (Swales 1990: 24)

Swales lists five defining characteristics of a discourse community, namely: public goals, mechanisms for intercommunication, utilization of one or more genres for communication, some specific lexis, and a notion that the “survival of the community depends on a reasonable ration between novices and experts” (Swales 1990: 26– 27). A further examination of the notion of genre within a discourse community framework suggests that genres “drift and evolve” (to use Biber and Finegan’s (1989) terms) and are influenced by “nonstructural underlying motivations” such as audience type, audience size and audience schematic expectations (Biber and Finegan 1989: 515–16). With the explosion of English as the language of many academic socio-rhetorical discourse communities, it is reasonable to suggest that non-native English speakers who wish to gain access to a discourse community must not only acquire English, but they must also structure their discourse to fit the expectations of the discourse community.

Emerging data An additional support for the hypotheses developed in this chapter comes from emerging data — some empirical, some anecdotal.

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For many students in non-native English national contexts, part of the knowledge that comes with entry in the field is to learn to write in the discourse community of the field, and approximate, as much as possible, the exo-normative discourse standards of the genre. For example, students in the physical sciences at Beijing Normal University are expected to provide an abstract in English for all their research projects. The best articles are then chosen for publication in the Journal of the Beijing Normal University — the very best written in English with a serious attempt to conform to the exo-normative standards of the genre. Incidentally, in a conversation I had a few years ago with Bjorn Melander who presented a chapter at the AAAL entitled “Journal Abstracts from three Academic Fields in the United States and Sweden: National of Disciplinary Proclivities?” Melander stated that Swedes “do not write strictly scientific articles in Swedish any longer.” So at least in Sweden, the sole language of the scientific genre is English. Graddol (1997: 9) indicates that something similar is happening with German scientists and academics, 98% of whom report English as their working language for physics, 83% for chemistry, 81% for biology and psychology, above 70% for mathematics, earth sciences, medical sciences and sociology. Linguistics, by the way, is reported at 35%. Surprisingly, 23% list English as the working language in literature. Because English is generally accepted as the language of information storage and retrieval, most of the world’s non-native English speaking countries have implemented strong English as a Second Language policies. In many of these nations, the only formal teaching of rhetorical development is conducted to help students gain access to English information. For example, many students I interviewed at Beijing Normal University said they had never had a lesson on how to structure Chinese discourse. Rather, all their discourse structure lessons were to enable students to decode English information presented within exo-normative, English-based frameworks. The above conclusions are verified somewhat by a recent issue of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (1995, Volume 6). The issue focuses on the teaching of writing in the Pacific basin. Regarding the teaching of writing Chinese in Hong Kong, Fu and Poon (1995: 46) state that “in Chinese educational tradition, the ability to write was considered a natural extension of one’s ability to read . . . no separate writing instruction per se was considered necessary.” Ahn (1995: 69) states similar thoughts for Korea. Namba (1995: 64) states, for Japan that “in spite of the differences in writing theory between English and Japanese, the changes in Japanese lifestyle have gradually forced Japanese language teachers to follow or introduce the Western writing methodology, especially over the past 20 years or so.” For Filipino, Gozales and Fortunato suggest that: as a general rule, the techniques employed in Filipino were borrowed from English communicative arts in terms of paragraph development and theme writing, since the skills were considered intuitively to be transferable from one language to the other. (Gozales and Fortunato 1995: 88)

Similar sentiments are expressed for Tagalog (94).

Rhetorical influences

All of this suggests that for some genres, the English-influenced preferred discourse patterns of international discourse communities are beginning to affect the preferred patterns of languages other than English, thus causing these genres to drift toward exo-normative standards. Evidence suggests that this drift is in progress. There are a host of intervening factors which will probably not result in total conformity to the exo-normative standard, but the texts which are produced will continue to be a mixture, or hybrid, of two overlapping discourse schema. As mentioned above, Eggington (1987) showed that there is an English-based influence on some Korean academic writing. In order to further explore this influence, Capell (1992) examined twenty-five essays and articles published by the Korean academic, intellectual journal Shin Tonga (New East Asia). He selected five text samples each year from journals published in 1965, 1972, 1982, 1985, and 1990. He analyzed each text in terms of: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Number of paragraphs Words per sentence T-units per text/sentence Coordinate structures Subordinate structures Superordinate structures Linear topical development Circular topical development Other forms of topical development Pronominalization Ellipses Discourse markers Loan words Profession of author Author’s experience in English speaking countries.

Capell’s purpose for conducting this type of micro-analytic research was to determine if there were some linguistic features which had been influenced by English. He found, among many interesting results, that a “new” pattern had emerged which was not considered as “good” Korean discourse. In this “sandwich” pattern, the main topic of the text appears to be sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion which seemed to be tangential to the topic (Capell 1992: 80). He also noted the occurrences of linear development of topic. In 1965, there were 2 examples; in 1972, 1 example; in 1982, 1 example, in 1985, 3 examples; and 1990, 4 examples. This trend somewhat verifies the hypothesis that there is a linear influence in modern Korean writing. Capell also noted that linear discourse is preferred by Korean readers “who have been either living or studying in America, or studying English” (76). In a similar study, Folman and Connor (1992) examined preferred patterns for topical development in research chapters produced by secondary students in Israel

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writing in Hebrew and a similar cohort of students in the United States writing in English. Their results suggest: that while the research paper is a universal norm-based product defined by the international academy, the products of the two culture groups were situated at different points along the (most pedagogical) approximative systems which aim at defining the research paper by universal quality norm. (Folman and Connor 1992)

The next support to this hypothesis requires that I be anecdotal. During a recent visit to Beijing Normal University in China, I interviewed a Chinese physics professor, Dr. Jiang Liu, concerning the influence of English in Chinese technological writing. He stated that Chinese physics students were using adverbial modifiers following English patterns. These patterns, he said, were not acceptable in social science written discourse. He also stated that English mathematical/physics formulae had influenced Chinese expression. As an example, he drew a triangle labeled ABC. In English, he said, and equation can be written thus: (1) AB = AC if, and only if, ∠a = ∠b. He explained that the preferred Chinese preferred pattern is: (2) if ∠a = ∠b then AB = AC. (where ∠ is degree of angle) Dr. Liu stated that even though the English structure (1), when translated into Chinese is awkward, students in college preferred to use (1) more than (2). He also stated that high school teachers were “angry” at college professors for allowing their students to write Chinese following the awkward English pattern (1). But, he continued, college students will continue to use (1) because of the examples set in their English textbooks. In their functional reference grammar for Mandarin Chinese, Li and Thompson (1989: 495–497) point out that the passive morpheme bei implies an adverse outcome for the recipient of the action. In other words, using the bei morpheme in a passive construction such as “Zhangsan was seen by people” implies unfortunate consequences for Zhangsan now that he has been seen. But as Li and Thompson explain: It has been observed by practically all Chinese grammarians that the number of bei constructions that do not express adversity is increasing, particularly in the written language of modern Chinese. This increase . . . is clearly due to the influence of the Indo-European languages, especially English. (Li and Thompson 1989: 496)

Li and Thompson later cite Chao who suggests that “no one talks in that way yet, but it is already common in scientific writing, in newspapers and in schools” (Chao 1970: 155). I am currently examining introductions to articles written in English and in Chinese contained within the Journal of Beijing Normal University to see how well they conform to exo-normative standards as set by the international scientific discourse

Rhetorical influences

community and described by Swales using his CARS (Create a Research Space) model. In a sense, I am replicating the work done by Taylor and Chen who also used the CARS model in their analysis of the introductions to Chinese scientific texts. By looking at the movements and steps as outlined by Swales’ CARS model, Taylor and Chen concluded that: whereas both Chinese and Anglo-American writers clearly base their discourse structure on the pattern of moves identified by Swales, and can therefore be said to be working within the same rhetorical ‘paradigm’ or schema, the former group particularly when writing in Chinese, show a certain tendency to omit a summary of the literature and also a clear preference for the simple, unelaborated patterns of the schema. The Chinese scholars are more likely to depart from the one convention while preserving more faithfully the other. The language in which they are writing seems to play a less important role than does some feature (or features) of the culture. (Taylor and Chen 1991: 327)

Interestingly, Taylor and Chen suggest that the cause of the macro-similarities between English and Chinese texts can be attributed to a phenomenon described by Needham that there is a synthesis or fusion between Chinese and Western science from the seventeenth century onwards after the arrival in China of the Jesuits. From that time, [Needham says], “it is no longer to distinguish any particular style in the contributions made by Chinese [scientific] thinkers and observers” (Needham 1965: 149). This observation appears to be verified by Hinds who, in his discussion of reader–writer responsibility in Japanese, notes that: there appears to be a major shift in typological style between Classical and Modern Chinese. Classical Chinese appears to be more like Japanese in that it is a reader-responsible language, while Modern Chinese is more like English in that it is a writer responsible language. (Hinds 1987: 145)

Conclusion The evidence presented above is still preliminary. However, it does appear that there is a trend toward an English-based rhetorical pattern in scientific/technological writing in some languages. The mechanism for this drift toward English-based rhetorical patterns is the spread of English in academic (and other) genres. This spread results in non-English speaking individuals being exposed to increasing amounts of English preferred patterns. Skousen (1989) has proposed a theory of language acquisition based upon “analogical modeling” — a non-rule approach to language performance that may explain the cognitive processes involved in this transfer of rhetorical patterns. Robinson (1995: 249) describes the process thus: Analogical or similarity-based reasoning uses a database of stored examples to draw probabilistic influences directly, without rule induction or (statistical or

26

262 William G. Eggington ‘neural’) learning. Novel instances are classified and outcomes are predicted on demand, based on prior experience of similar situations.

So far, indications are that this approach successfully accounts for a host of variation phenomena at phonological and morphological levels. I believe the same pattern recognition and pattern reliance processes are followed in linguistic macro-structures such as in the development of rhetorical preferences. Should such become the case, it is possible to extend Connor’s thoughtful discussion regarding the influences on a newly defined contrastive rhetoric. Table 3 takes Connor’s theoretical categories, lists how they are realized in L1 to L2 contexts (as per Connor) and then extends each category to include L2 (English) to L1 influences. The fourth column briefly lists implications for contrastive rhetoric studies. Of course, further research needs to be conducted with a host of languages in order to determine the extent of English influences and the predominant causes and effects of English. And, of course, questions need to be raised regarding issues of linguistic imperialism (English as “big killer language” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000) as balanced against the desire of humankind to conform to linguistic standards as an aid in communication. As it stands now, though, there does appear to be the foundations of an English influence that may rival Latin’s preeminent position throughout the past 1,500 years. A host of historical, political, economic, technological and social variables will determine if English can sustain its synchronic and diachronic influences to a degree approaching the influence of Latin — thus the question mark at the end of the title to this chapter.

References Ahn, B. 1995. “The teaching of writing in Korea.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 6(1/2): 67–76. Atkinson, D. 1991. Sociohistorical register variation in written medical discourse. Doctoral qualifying paper, University of Southern California. Biber, D. and E. Finegan. 1989. “Drift and evolution of English style: A history of three genres.” Language 65: 487–517. Capell, J. 1992. Korean Academic Discourse: A chronological and preferential perspective. Unpublished M. A. Thesis. Brigham Young University. Clyne, M. 1985. “Beyond grammar: Some thoughts on communication rules in our multicultural society.” J. Pride (ed.), Cross-cultural Encounters: Communication and mis-communication, 12–23. Clyne, M. 1984. “English and German.” R. Kaplan (ed.), Annual review of applied linguistics 3: 38–49. Clyne, M. 1981. “Culture and discourse structure.” Journal of pragmatics 5: 61–66. Connor, U. 1996. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dantas-Whitney, M., and Grabe, W. 1989. A comparison of Portuguese and English newspaper editorials. Paper presented at the 23rd Annual TESOL Convention, San Antonio, TX.

Patterns of language and writing are culture specific

Writing as communication and persuasion is affected by audience

Texts and writing have systematic, analyzable variation

Writing is task and situation based and results in discourse types

Activity of writing is embedded in culture

Texts are translatable across cultures but may take different manifestations

Theory of linguistic relativity

Theory of rhetoric

Theory of text linguistics

Theory of discourse types and genres

Theory of literacy

Theory of translation

If sufficient texts from language A are translated in and read in language B, language A linguistic patterns will influence B patterns.

In many contexts, the only overt teaching of writing is modeled on Western/English pedagogies and patterns

The strength of international discourse communities (Western/English based) influences discourse types in some LOTE genres

Variation can be explained by surface level modeling (frequent exposure to patterns results in adoption of those patterns)

With certain genres, the audience predominantly functions in international English

An invasive culture (Western/ American) can alter patterns of language and writing

In certain genres, second language patterns (English) can transfer to first language

English to LOTE realization

Source: Connor (1996: 9)

First languages patterns transfer to second language

Theory of applied linguistics

Note: LOTE = Language other than English

L1 to L2 realization

Theoretical foundation

Table 3. An adaptation of Connor’s influences on contrastive rhetoric model

LOTE rhetorical patterns in genres experiencing a high frequency of English translated texts may drift toward English rhetorical preferences.

English-based rhetorical patterns may be codified in many LOTEs

Conscious and subconscious pressures on many LOTE genres to move toward English based patterns

More exposure to English-based rhetorical patterns will alter rhetorical preferences in many LOTEs

The pervasiveness of international genres is increasing, thus decreasing L1 genre domains

“Westernization, Englishization” is resulting in moving rhetorical preferences in many LOTE genres towards English preferences

The rhetorical patterns of some languages in some genres are “drifting” toward English based on preferences. Researchers cannot simply assume that the LOTE texts they are studying have not already been influenced by English

Implications for contrastive rhetoric studies

Rhetorical influences 263

264 William G. Eggington Eggington, W. 1987. “Written academic discourse in Korean: Implications for effective communication.” In U. Connor and R. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 153–168. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Fishman J., R. Cooper, and A. Conrad. 1975. The Spread of English. Cambridge: Newbury House. Folman S. and U. Connor. 1992. “Intercultural rhetorical differences in constructing a research paper.” Unpublished paper presented at TESOL, Vancouver, March 1992. Fu, G. and E. Poon. 1995. “The teaching of writing in Hong Kong: Quality assured or inferior product.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 6(1/2): 45–54. Gonzalez, A., and T. Fortunato. 1995.“The teaching of writing in English and in Filipino in the Philippines.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 6(1/2): 85–101. Grabe, W. and R. B. Kaplan. 1996. Theory and Practice of Writing. New York: Longaman. Graddol, D. 1997. The Future of English. London: The British Council. http://www.britcoun. org Hinds, J. 1987.“Reader versus writer responsibility: A new typology” U. Connor and R. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 141–152. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Hinds, J. 1982. “Contrastive rhetoric: Japanese and English.” Paper given at the 16th Annual TESOL Convention, March 1982. Hinds, J. 1980. “Japanese expository prose.” Papers in linguistics 13: 117–158. Kachru, Braj. 1990. The Alchemy of English: The spatial functions and models of non-native Englishes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kachru, Y. 1984. “English and Hindi.” R. Kaplan (ed.), Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 3: 50–77. Kaplan, R. B. 1987. “Cultural thought patterns revisited.” U. Connor and R. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 9–22. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Kaplan, R. B. 1972. The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a functional theory of rhetoric. Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development. Kaplan, R. B. 1966. “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.” Language Learning 16: 1–20. Lautamatti, L. 1987. “Observations on the development of the topic of simplified discourse.” U. Connor and R. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 9–22. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Li, C. and S. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Millward, C. 1996. A Biography of the English Language. Second edition. Fort Worth: Holt, Reinhart, Winston. Namba, T. 1995. “The teachings of writing in Japan.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 6(1/2): 55–65. Needham, J. 1965. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman. Radd, B. 1989.“Modern trends in scientific terminology: Morphology and metaphor.” American speech 64(2). Robinson, D. 1995. “Index and analogy: A footnote to the theory of signs. Rivista di linguistica 7(2): 249–272.

Rhetorical influences Skousen, R. 1989. Analogical Modeling of Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 2000. “Linguistic human rights and teachers of English.” In J. Kelly Hall and W. Eggington (eds.), The Sociopolitics of English Language Teaching. London: Multilingual Matters. Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. 1985. “English as the international language of research.” RELC Journal 16:1. Taylor, G., and T. Chen. 1991. “Linguistic, cultural, and sub-cultural issues in contrastive discourse analysis: Anglo-American and Chinese scientific texts.” Applied Linguistics 12 (3): 319–336. Tsao, F-F. 1984. “English and Mandarin.” In R. Kaplan (ed.), Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 3: 99–117. Widdowson, H. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zellermayer, M. 1988. “An analysis of oral and literate texts: Two types of reader–writer relationships in Hebrew and English.” In B. A. Rafoth and D. L. Rubin (eds.), The Social Combination of Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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CHAPTER 15

Contrastive discourse analysis Argumentative text in English and Spanish* Joanne Neff Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Emma Dafouz Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Mercedes Díez Universidad de Alcalá, Alcaláde Henares

Rosa Prieto Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, Madrid

Craig Chaudron University of Hawai‘i

Introduction This chapter reports on a three-year research project on argumentative texts (Werlich 1983) by the Spainwrite team in the Departamento de Filología Inglesa at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The project consists of a cross-sectional comparison of texts by a) professional English and Spanish L1 writers (newspaper essays), b) Spanish university students (first- and fourth-year students) writing in both Spanish (their L1), and English, their foreign language (L2), and c) the English L1 writing of United States university writers of approximately the same age. The study is unique in its comparison of Spanish and U.S. writers, and both developing and professional writers in both L1s and English L2. Thus, it provides data for a developmental analysis of 1) L2 English (first- and fourth-year Spanish EFL writers), 2) L1 English (American university students as compared to professional writers in English), and 3) L1 Spanish (first-year, fourth-year, and professional Spanish writers). This will allow us especially to disambiguate characteristics of novice writing (developmental factors in NL writing) in L1 from factors of L2 proficiency. Much work done in contrastive discourse analysis has sought to test Kaplan’s (1966) original thesis that different “culturo-linguistic systems” produce different types of discourse or rhetorically structured texts in L2 writing.As Grabe and Kaplan (1996) and others (Taylor and Tingguang 1991) have noted, much of this research

268 Neff, Dafouz, Díez, Prieto, and Chaudron

focusing only on student writers’ production has failed to disambiguate variables related to linguistic constraints associated with L2 use: aspects of writers’ developmental abilities both in the L1 and the L2, from novice to advanced, and transfer factors — either linguistic or cultural, or both. For example, fewer occurrences of a particular type of embedding in non-native texts — as compared to those written by native speakers (NSs) — may be due to the level of non-native writers’ target language proficiency. On the other hand, it is equally possible that a lower embedding frequency is due to a lack of experience (i.e., a novice writer) in constructing more complex texts, a task for which a more proficient writer may use a variety of devices, such as word order, embedding, or connectors, to differentiate old information from new and thus signal the relationship among ideas. Still another explanation for low frequency of embedded clauses, or a very high frequency of coordinate clauses in their place, might be negative or positive transfer from the L1, either in the case that the embedding device is not possible in the L1 or that although it exists within the L1 linguistic resources, the embedding mechanism is not stylistically favored by L1 writing norms, which might favor coordination. Apart from a lack of control for text type found in some of the earlier studies, contrastive writing studies have often assumed that L2 student texts are the products of writers proficient in their L1 culture. Thus, the characteristics which surface from the analysis of their texts are thought to be those present also in L1 written discourse. For instance, based on work carried out in her 1988 doctoral dissertation on quantitative differences in “English prose” written by Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and English students, Reid came to the following conclusion about the Spanishspeaker writers: . . . most contrastive rhetoric studies assume that, of the three non-English languages in this study, Spanish most resembles English. However, recent research (Ostler 1987a, b; Reid 1988) suggests that significant differences between English and Spanish exist and that, in some ways, Spanish is more similar to Arabic than to English. For example, in Reid’s research (1988), which examined the co-occurrence of language features in the corpus of the present study, native speakers of English used few coordinate conjunctions, a high percentage of passive voice verbs, and a high percentage of prepositions. However, both Arabic and Spanish writers (but not Chinese writers) used significantly more coordinate conjunctions, and significantly fewer prepositions and passive-voice verbs. Ostler (1987b) indicated that one reason for the similar linguistic co-occurrence in Arabic and Spanish may be the influence of 600 years of occupation by the Moors in Spain. (Reid 1990: 201)

Reid does not mention the level of English proficiency of the writers nor does she compare the student L2 texts to those written by proficient (i.e., published) L1 writers of the languages in question. However useful student groups writing in their L1s may be in providing the necessary control groups, their writing can hardly be considered a paragon for any particular text type, and their texts probably cannot be considered as examples of very proficient writing.

Contrastive discourse analysis 269

Furthermore, Reid does not specify which countries her student writers come from, although the culturo-linguistic contexts of Spanish-speaking student writers may be very different (i.e., Peninsular Spanish, varieties of South American, Central American, and Caribbean Spanish). There is no reason to assume, as Reid does, that the norms for argumentative and expository texts follow the same linguistic and cultural patterns throughout the Spanish-speaking world. As Lux (personal communication) points out, argumentative texts produced by Ecuadorian professional writers may differ substantially from Peninsular Spanish texts as to the way in which information is conveyed to the reader, thereby allowing for the possibility of less coordination and more embedded sentences in Peninsular Spanish editorial writing. Grabe and Kaplan (1996: 194) seem to give credit to Reid’s interpretation and review three other studies (Montaño-Harmon 1991; Lux and Grabe 1991; and Reppen and Grabe 1993) which showed Spanish student writers using more subordinated and coordinated clauses. None of these studies involved comparison with the written production of professional writers in Spanish. In fact, in relation to the linguistic devices preferred by L2 writers of English, few studies have used data, controlled for genre and text type, from NS professional writers for comparison with texts produced by the student writers.1 Thus, few conclusions can be drawn about whether the devices used in L2 student texts reflect L1 influence (e.g. conventions of L1 discourse carrying over into L2 written discourse), novice writer characteristics (e.g. features of informal oral discourse used in both L1 and L2 formal written discourse), or proficiency in the second language (e.g. errors in syntax, vocabulary, etc.). In this study, we attempt to tease apart these three factors which may influence the EFL writing of (Peninsular) Spanish university students. More specifically, we wish to compare the conventions characteristic of good argumentative writing in English and in Spanish to find out whether Spanish and English might, in some respect, require different means of structuring information. In studying these writers, we wished to distinguish which factors might be produced by linguistic or genre transfer from the L1 and which factors emerge from developmental aspects of writing. We examine the following research questions: 1. Do English professional writers differ significantly from Spanish professional writers on variables measuring structural (complexity) or information-related (types of subordination or coordination)? If so, can such differences tell us anything about preferences within discourse communities? 2. Do Spanish student writers in their first year of university studies, writing in their L1, differ from students in their fourth year on any of the variables?2 Do either of these groups differ from Spanish professional writers? If so, can the differences be considered novice-writer developmental characteristics? 3. Do first-year Spanish students writing in L2 English differ significantly from fourth-year Spanish writers on any of the variables? If so, can the differences be considered from a L2 developmental perspective?

270 Neff, Dafouz, Díez, Prieto, and Chaudron

4. Do Spanish university student writers altogether differ significantly from United States student writers or from the English L1 professional writers on any of the variables? If so, can the differences be considered cases of transfer?

Method Corpus The corpus studied, summarized in Table 1, consists of written argumentative texts from the following sources: a) 15 editorial articles written in L1 English by professional authors (published in editorial or opinion pages of the International Herald Tribune, Paris, or the Times, London); b) 15 editorial articles written in L1 Spanish by professional authors (published in the opinion pages of El Pais, Madrid); c) 30 essays written in L2 English by fourth-year EFL students; d) 30 essays written in L1 Spanish by these same fourth-year students; e) 30 essays written in L2 English by first-year EFL students; f) 30 essays written in L1 Spanish by these same first-year students; and g) 30 essays written in L1 English by U.S. university students (from Kalamazoo College and Boston Universities). All the university students were studying at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Spanish natives in an English Language and Literature degree program, and the English-speaking natives in a Spanish language study-abroad program. The professional newspaper essays were selected as argumentative-expository, with an attempt to match the topics between the two languages, while all the essays of the university students, both in Spanish and English, were written according to the same task description (“In not less than 300 words, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of an invention or discovery which has significantly changed the lives of people in the twentieth century”), and Table 1. Texts compared in the study Writing group

Number of texts

Number of words

English professionals, in E (EP) (matched for topic similarity with SP)

15

8,390

Spanish professionals, in S (SP) (matched for topic similarity with EP)

15

7,651

4th-yr Spanish students, in E (4E) (topic and student matched with 4S)

30

10,061

4th-yr Spanish students, in S (4S)

30

12,028

1st-yr Spanish students, in E (1E) (topic and student matched with 1S)

30

9,893

1st-yr Spanish students in S (1S)

30

10,499

U.S. University Students, in E (NS) (topic and student matched with 4S)

30

11,887

Contrastive discourse analysis

were written in class without reference aids, during a 45-minute period.3 The order of language of writing for the Spanish native students was counterbalanced across sub-groups of students.

Variables selected for analysis In order to separate different types of factors — those usually studied in contrastive rhetoric and those analyzed in developmental studies — multiple dimensions of the texts are studied, comprising two types of variables (cf. Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, and Kim 1998): a. from a structural perspective (syntactic): words per T-unit (W/TU)4 and words per clause are measures of fluency; total finite and non-finite clauses per T-unit (TOTCL/TU) and other subordination indices are measures of syntactic complexity; b. from an information-based perspective: type of subordinate finite (nominal, relative, adverbial) and non-finite (infinitival, gerundival, participial) clauses used to include background information (ratios per T-unit); and the number and types of coordinate connectors per T-unit. The nominal clauses are examined for the types of verbs controlling the complement clauses (e.g. think, say, argue, show, etc.). ‘Word’ was defined as conventional words, or any compound words (as connected by hyphens or, although not connected by hyphens, conventionally used only in fixed expressions, e.g. United States). ‘Clause’ was defined, following Halliday, as finite (main clause or subordinate with tensed verb) and non-finite (infinitival — both with and without to, gerundival, or participial). The connectors considered are the coordinate conjunctions — and, but, and or (y, pero, and o), although conjuncts, as defined by Quirk, et al. (1985: 520–532), are included in the larger on-going study. Neff, et al. (1996) provide a preliminary summary of these results. Conjunctions were counted exclusively when they joined T-units. Raw scores obtained by individual raters were checked by at least two other raters. For purposes of comparison across texts of unequal length, raw scores for each variable were divided by the number of T-units per composition, upon which descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated (ANOVA, alpha pre-set at p < .01). In general, there are no substantive typological differences between English and Spanish with regard to the variables measured in this study.5

Results and discussion We begin with the analysis of the professional writers of argumentative texts in each language in order to establish the conventional, presumably target, usage of the variables mentioned above. We will then consider the student writers within their L1

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language groups, that is the native student writers of Spanish along with the professional Spanish L1 writers, and then the students writing in L2 English, compared with native student writers of English and professional L1 English writers.

Analysis of structuring variables in texts written by English and Spanish professional writers Syntactic variables

Table 2 shows the means, standard deviations (s.d.), and the results of analyses of variance between L1 groups for each of the syntactic variables, made comparable for the 15 English and Spanish professional writers (EP and SP) by dividing by the number of T-units in each text. With respect to the first research question concerning the contrast between English and Spanish professional writers, we find significant differences between the two groups of writers (either Spanish greater than English — S > E, or the reverse, E > S) on the following variables: Words per T-Unit (W/TU): S > E Words per clause (W/CL): S > E Relative clauses per T-Unit (RC/TU): S > E Example: “For weeks, public attention has been focused on Katherine Ann Powers, who joined the anti-Vietnam War movement . . .” Table 2. Syntactic and connector differences between english and spanish professional writers Variables

Mean

± s.d

Mean

± s.d.

p

W/TU W/CL TOTCL/TU FINCL/TU FINSUB/TU NC/TU RC/TU AC/TU NONFIN/TU IC/TU GC/TU PC/TU SUBCL/TU And/Y/TU But/Pero/TU Or/O/RU

17.63 11.05 2.22 1.61 .61 .22 .23 .16 .61 .33 .18 .09 1.22 .085 .114 .00

± 2.29 ±1.62 ± .33 ± .23 ± .23 ± .11 ± .14 ± .10 ± .23 ± .16 ± .10 ± .07 ± .33 ±.041 ± .068 –

27.10 13.78 2.79 1.99 .99 .37 .44 .16 .796 .58 .02 .19 1.79 .079 .087 .00

± 6.6 ± 2.43 ± .83 ± .50 ± .50 ± .36 ± .24 ± .13 ± .46 ± .43 ± .04 ± .10 ± .83 ± .062 ± .078 –

< .0001 =.0011 NS = .013 = .013 NS < .01 NS NS NS < .0001 < .01 NS NS NS –

.199

± .079

.167

± .074

NS

Total Conjunctions

Contrastive discourse analysis

Gerundival clauses per T-unit (GC/TU): E > S Example: “The year-to-year increase of 2 million uninsured also conceals two trends moving in opposite directions.” Participial clauses per T-Unit (PC/TU): S > E Example: “. . . she may not earn any profit from books, movies, and the like related to her crime.” Both Finite Subordinate Clauses per T-Unit (FINSUB/TU) and Finite Clauses per T-unit (FINCL/TU — the standard subordination index involving finite subordinates + T-units / TU) approached significance, with the higher production in Spanish L1 than in English L1. Variables not significantly different were: Total clauses (finite and non-finite) per T-Unit (TOTCL/TU) Nominal clauses per T-Unit (NC/TU) Example: “It may be that she did not intend that an innocent man would die.” Adverbial clauses per T-Unit (AC/TU) Example: “. . . and had been a fugitive for twenty-three years before she turned herself in last month.” Non-finite clauses per T-Unit (NONFIN/TU) Infinitive clauses per T-Unit (IC/TU) Example: “A constitutional challenge may be brought to test that prohibition . . .” and total subordinate clauses per T-Unit (SUBCL/TU). It will be noted that, with the exception of GC/TU and AC/TU, each of these variables reveal means that are higher for the Spanish writers than the English writers, and that some of these are close to significantly different, that is p>.01, but below an alpha criterion of .05 (TOTCL/TU, FINCL/TU, and SUBCL/TU, p = .02; IC/TU, p = .04). The significant differences in W/TU and W/CL, with Spanish writers producing longer units of each type, coupled with the non-significant differences in both finite clauses and total subordinate clauses per T-unit, suggests that Spanish writers may use more right-branching post-modification, most of which will take the form of prepositional phrases, or a past participle followed by a prepositional phrase, such as “oil demand growth,” which must be expressed in Spanish as “el crecimiento de la demanda de petrolio” (White 1999). With respect to the types of subordinate clauses favored by each group, Table 2 shows that the EP writers use almost the same number of subordinate finite clauses as non-finite clauses (means of .61 and .61, respectively), while the SP writers use more subordinate finite than non-finite clauses, although not significantly more (means of .99 and .80, respectively; paired t-test, p > .1). Comparing the two groups, the production by SPs of more finite subordinate clauses is significantly greater than that of the EPs (p = .013). Although the

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magnitudes are higher for all finite subordinate clause types, this result is most directly influenced by the significantly greater production of relative clauses by Spanish than English writers (means of .44 versus .23, respectively). A more detailed study of subordinate nominal clauses shows that, for both L1 writers, EP and SP, the majority of that-complement clauses are controlled by verbs (i.e. consider that, argue that, say that), rather than adjectives (i.e. we are glad that) or other nominals (i.e. the fact that) — 61% of the nominal clauses for the EPs and 43% for the SPs. Furthermore, professional writers commonly use more impersonal verbs to control the that-complement clause, such as argue, show, suggest, admit, etc., rather than the types that are frequently found in conversation (Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 1998: 103), i.e. think, say and know. This finding is important when comparing professionals with student writing. For non-finite clauses, the SPs use .80 per T-unit, while the English professional writers use .61. This difference is not significant, as it is obscured by the significant reverse preferences of SP writers for participial clauses and EP writers for gerunds, with SPs also tending to produce more infinitives than EPs (p = .044). In sum, the structural analysis of L1 professional argumentative texts shows that SPs tend to write more words per syntactic unit, and have a more complex syntax based on greater production of relative clauses and participials, as well as possibly infinitives. Although the SP writers appear to prefer finite subordination to non-finite forms, this difference is not significant.

Connectors

Table 2 also shows the conjunctions the L1 professional writers use to connect Tunits. These data reveal that the or/o conjunction is not used at all by either group. Although no differences in conjunctions proves significant, EPs appear to use conjunctions slightly more than SPs. This use undermines the notion that a “loose coordination” (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 194) is preferred by the Spanish-speaking discourse community.

Comparison of structuring and information-related variables for all writers in Spanish L1 The second set of research questions concerned the characteristics of the Spanish writers (1S — 4S — SP) in their L1. Our analysis reveals developmental aspects in both the syntactic and information-related variables.

Syntactic variables

Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations on the syntactic variables for each of the three groups writing in L1 Spanish. As can be observed, the only variables showing a significant difference among all the writers in Spanish are the two measures of complexity, W/CL and W/TU (p < .0001), and the one measure of participial clauses per T-unit (p = .0108). In each of these cases, the SPs use significantly more

Contrastive discourse analysis

words per clause and T-unit, and more participials per T-unit than either the 1S or 4S writers (post hoc tests using Tukey’s Honest Significant Differences — HSD, alpha=.05). As with the English professional writer data, this result leads us to the conclusion that the complexity of professional writing may consist not only of embedding clauses (for which the evidence here is weaker), but also of constructing complex noun phrases, an aspect we have yet to measure (cf. Chafe and Danielewicz 1987; Yau 1991). It should be noted, however, that with the exception of essentially two of the remaining variables (adverbial clauses per T-unit and thus total finite subordinate clauses per T-unit; and gerunds per T-unit), the trends in all cases show increasing use of subordination from 1S to SP, with a concomitant tendency toward an increase in variance (s.d.) from at least one level to an adjacent one. This is a clear sign that most of these are developmental in Spanish writers’ sophistication. Spanish professionals, unlike the English ones, appear to use more finite subordinate clauses than non-finite clauses. A still greater tendency in this direction is revealed in the results for the university Spanish writers, such that both the firstand fourth-year students’ produce significantly more finite subordinate clauses than non-finite subordinate clauses (two-tailed t-test — df = 29 in each case; p < .0001). The narrowing of this difference from university students to professionals is also evidently a sign of L1 developmental progress. Table 3. Syntactic and connector differences among writers in Spanish 1S (n = 30)

4S (n = 30)

SP (n = 15)

Variables

Mean

Mean

Mean

W/TU W/CL TOTCL/TU FINCL/TU FINSUB/TU NC/TU RC/TU AC/TU NONFIN/TU IC/TU GC/TU PC/TU SUBCL/TU And/Y/TU But/Pero/TU Or/O/RU

17.56§ ± 4.77 9.26§ ± 1.97 2.47 ± .53 1.89 ± .31 .89 ± .31 .30 ± .21 .36 ± .17 .23 ± .15 .58 ± .32 .41 ± .24 .06 ± .07 .09§ ± .07 1.47 ± .53 .13 .08 .003

Total Conjunctions

.21

± s.d.

± .10

± s.d

18.16‡ ± 4.37 9.18‡ ± 1.48 2.595 ± .71 2.01 ± .52 1.01 ± .52 .36 ± .24 .39 ± .25 .26 ± .18 .59 ± .31 .43 ± .25 .06 ± .09 .10‡ ± .096 1.595 ± .71 .14 .11 .01 .19

.11

± s.d

27.10 §‡ ± 6.6 13.78 §‡ ± 2.43 2.79 ± .83 1.99 ± .50 .99 ± .50 .37 ± .36 .44 ± .24 .16 ± .13 .796 ± .46 .58 ± .43 .02 ± .04 .19§‡ ± .10 1.79 ±.83 .08 .09 .00 .17

§‡ Commonly marked pairs are significantly different from one another (p < .05)

± .07

p < .0001 < .0001 NS NS NS NS NS NS NS NS NS =.0108 NS

NS

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276 Neff, Dafouz, Díez, Prieto, and Chaudron

Information-related variables

Although there are no significant differences among the number of subordinate nominal finite clauses used by the Spanish groups, with a more detailed analysis of the verbs, differences in the qualitative aspects of writing did appear. Of the nominal clauses written by the SPs, 43% depend on verbs such as prueba, indica, señala, revela (‘proves’, ‘indicates’, ‘signals’, ‘reveals’), used with third person subjects. In only one essay did a professional writer use a first person subject, e.g. ‘I think that . . .’ In comparison, in the student essays, the nominal clauses depend more often on verbs indicating personal mental states (think, believe, etc.) — 63% and 64% of all nominal clauses for 1S and 4S students, respectively; moreover, there is a much greater tendency (35% and 21% for 1S and 4S) to produce subjects of these in the first person (e.g. Creo que. . .‘I think that . . .’). These analyses reflect the novice-writer quality of the student essays, but, from first to fourth year, they also show discourse development, in that the 4S group seem to be adopting a more impersonal stance when offering arguments. As was already observed in the comparison of non-finite clause use for both groups of professional writers, Spanish writers as a group have higher levels of infinitival clauses use than of the other two non-finite clause types. The professionals, in fact, have the lowest level of all subordinate clause use in their .02 per T-unit production of gerundival clauses. Whether this suggests a dispreferred style for journalistic writing deserves to be investigated.

Connectors

The production of conjunctions by writers in Spanish is also summarized in Table 3. None of the differences across levels of Spanish writers is significant. Nonetheless, there appears to be a consistent tendency for the use of conjuncts and conjunctions to decrease or remain steady from university to professional writing. The fact that the student writers tend to use y (‘and’), in particular, more frequently than do professional writers lends support to our hypothesis that the overuse of and as a conjunction reported by many researchers for Spanish-speaking ESL writers may more likely be due to the students’ lack of experience in writing, rather than to a transfer effect from L1 standards in discourse, at least with regard to the Peninsular Spanish variety. On the other hand, the use of pero (‘but’) does not show the same decline from student to professional writing, which may be a consequence of the argumentative writing sampled in these newspaper articles.

Analysis of structuring and information-related variables in English texts Written in L1 English by native speakers and L2 English by Spanish writers Syntactic variables

To answer our third and fourth research questions, we present the analysis of variables related to syntax and connectors, in Table 4, which shows the means and standard deviations for each of the four groups writing in English: first-year EFL

± .11

.20

15.2§* 8.78§+ 2.32§‡ 1.78§ .78§ .28§ .25 .25§ .50 .30 .20 .03§ 1.32§‡ .12 .08 .006

Mean

4E (n=30)

.12

± 3.1 ± 1.4 ± .58 ± .38 ± .38 ± .16 ± .18 ± .17 ± .30 ± .17 ± .18 ± .04 ± .58

± s.d.

.17§

14.8‡ 9.9§‡ 1.95§ 1.53§ .53§ .18§ .18 .16§ .44 .26 .14 .02‡ .95§ .12 .04 .002

Mean

NS (n=30)

± .09

±2.6 ±2.0 ± .31 ± .23 ± .23 ± .14 ±.15 ± .08 ± .24 ± .16 ± .11 ± .03 ± .31

± s.d.

§ ‡ * + Commonly marked pairs are significantly different from one another (p < .05)

.25§

± 2.6 ± 1.4 .44 ± .25 ± .26 ± .13 ± .13 ± .15 ± .26 ± .15 ± .16 ± .04 ± .42

13.0§‡ 8.2*‡ 2.02‡ 1.61 .61 .21 .19 .22 .40 .23 .14 .02* 1.00‡ .12 .11 .008

W/TU W/CL TOTCL/TU FINCL/TU FINSUB/TU NC/TU RC/TU AC/TU NONFIN/TU IC/TU GC/TU PC/TU SUBCL/TU And/Y/TU But/Pero/TU Or/O/RU

Total Conjunctions

± s.d.

Mean

Variables

1E (n=30)

Table 4. Syntactic and connector differences among writers in English

± s.d.

.199

± .08

17.6*+‡ ± 2.3 ± 1.6 11.1*+ 2.2 ± .33 1.61 ± .23 .61 ± .23 .22 ± .11 ± .14 .23 .10 .16 .61 ± .23 ± .16 .33 .18 ± .10 .09§‡* ± .07 1.22 ± .33 .08 .09 .00 –

Mean

EP (n=15)

=.02

< .0001 < .0001 < .01 < .01 < .01 =.036 NS = .034 NS NS NS < .0001 < .01

p

Contrastive discourse analysis 277

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Spanish students (1E), fourth-year EFL Spanish students (4E), U.S. college students (NS), and professional native English-speaking writers (EP). As we have seen in the comparison of Spanish writing, and as has been found in previous studies (Wolfe-Quintero, et al. 1998), the measure of words per clause and words per T-unit differentiates significantly among the English writer groups (p < .0001). Following post-hoc comparisons with Tukey’s HSD, it was found that the EP writers produce significantly longer T-units than any of the other groups, and the 4E group’s W/TU measure is significantly greater than 1E group as well, likely reflecting a developmental aspect of fluency in L2 writing. On the W/CL, both the EPs and the NS students are higher than the two non-native groups (1E and 4E), but are not different from one another. With regard to the dominant measure of subordination complexity (cf. WolfeQuintero, et al. 1998), finite clauses per T-unit (FINCL/TU), the 4E Spanish students show a significantly higher level of clausal embedding than their NS university level counterparts, which appears to be due primarily to greater ratios of production of nominal and adverbial clauses per T-unit than the U.S. study-abroad group. When total clauses (non-finite clauses as well) per T-unit were included in a subordination ratio (TOTCL/TU and SUBCL/TU), the 4E essays are more complex than the 1E students as well. Since it can be observed in the previous Table 3 that there is a regular progression (though not significant) of total and subordinate clause ratios from 1S to 4S to SP L1 Spanish writing, this could be evidence of transfer into the L2. A preference for finite subordination in the L1 may encourage the use of such clauses in L2 English. We have previously observed in the EP-SP comparison and in the Spanish L1 writing comparison that Spanish writers seem to prefer finite-clause embedding. In the English data, the subordinate clause production of L1 Spanish students shows a progression from 60% finite clauses and 40% non-finite for 1E, then 78%/50% for 4E, contrasting with a 56%/44% and 50%/50% split for the NS and EP L1 English groups. This leads us to propose a developmental explanation, following separate tendencies for the native and non-native student writers.

Information-related variables

The type of finite clause chosen by the EFL Spanish students is overwhelmingly thclause. For the 1E group, 75% of the nominal clauses are of this type, and of all the thclauses, 64% are of the least complex type, with the th-clause functioning as direct object. Many of these sentence types have verbs such as think, know, say, and realize — in fact, T-units beginning with I think are so prevalent that they constitute 26% of all the nominal subordinates used. For the 4E group, who wrote a greater number of nominal clauses than all the other student groups, T-units beginning with a first person pronoun and a verb such as think or know account for only 16% of the total nominal clauses and for the NS student group only 12%. We have already noted in the EP — SP comparison that this type of personal stance is not frequent in written Spanish argumentative discourse; thus, such a pattern of use does not seem to in-

Contrastive discourse analysis

dicate transfer from L1 discourse patterns. Rather, the decrease in the fourth-year data seems to indicate a developmental pattern — as students advance in university years, they are more able to adopt an impersonal stance. At first, the data for non-finite clauses in Table 4 appear to offer more evidence that there may be an L1 transfer effect in regard to the type of subordinate clause chosen by the Spanish EFL students. The EPs tend to employ more non-finite clauses than the EFL comparison groups and even the less developed NS writers, significantly so for participial clauses. The raw data reveal, however, that the 4E group tend toward greater production of the different non-finite clauses, in the direction of the EP group, even though their NS counterparts maintain a lower rate of production similar to that of the 1E group. These fourth-year students are likely influenced by the dominant preference for infinitival clauses seen in the SPs’ data, a much greater proportion than that of the EP group (Table 2). This result seems to indicate that once EFL Spanish students become proficient enough in English, they can more readily transfer their Spanish L1 preferences to the L2. On the other hand, the 4E appear to be acquiring the developmental use of English gerundival clauses, not at all common in the L1 Spanish writing of any of the groups seen in Table 3. As this is the least favored non-finite construction, this tendency cannot reflect L1 transfer effects. The EP group wrote a significantly greater number of participial clauses than any of the other three English writing groups (p < .0001), including the NS group. This result may point to participial embedding as a complexity variable that may show developmental tendencies in both EFL writing and in NS writing in English. Note that the low rate of participial production in English cannot be explained by Spanish speakers’ avoidance, or negative transfer from L1 preferences, as the SP group produces significantly more participials than the EP group.

Connectors

Table 4 displays the results of connector use for the four groups writing in English. Although differences among groups are not significant for rate of conjunctions, there is an evident trend for the L2 writers to use these informational devices as often or more often than the native speakers, with especially the EPs tending toward a spare use of most of them. The professionals, of course, unlike the university students who were asked to write extemporaneously on an argumentative topic, may be constrained by space and stylistic concerns with newspaper articles, in which it might be considered less elegant to specify the semantic relations between propositions with external signals. By comparing Table 4 with Table 3, it is clear that the trends in connector production by Spanish EFL learners can not easily be attributed to any L1 influences. In fact, an example to the contrary is seen in other analyses of data from Spanish writers’ production of additive connectors. Although in Spanish, también, ‘also,’ is the most frequent conjunct used as a listing device (about 30% of uses for 1S, 4S, and SP), and also is the most frequently used listing conjunct for the NS and EP

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280 Neff, Dafouz, Díez, Prieto, and Chaudron

groups (over 50%), the Spanish 1E and 4E groups writing in L2 English produce also in under 10% of uses. This pattern of use appears much more to be a matter of developmental tendencies for the Spanish students as formal writers. With the evident exception of under-production of “contrastive” conjuncts relative to both native speaker groups — even though qualitatively speaking, sin embargo, ‘however,’ and however were preferred by all writers regardless of language — these learners (along with the NS group relative to the professionals) appear more to be prone to over-expression in English of the semantic relationships that would otherwise be implicit in propositional relations between sentences.6

Conclusion The significant syntactic differences between the English and the Spanish professional writers — apparent contrastive rhetoric factors — were (1) the greater number of W/T-unit and W/Clause in the Spanish texts, (2) the greater production of finite clauses over non-finite clauses in Spanish, (3) the Spanish authors’ greater production of participial clauses, and (4) the English authors’ greater production of gerundival clauses.7 In the information-bearing connector usage, no significant trends were evident, so that our conclusion is a negative one. It is often mentioned that ESL Spanish writers produce connectors too much, as an L1 transfer effect. Aside from the lack of analytical specifications in many such studies describing the exact interor intra-clausal uses in question, none of these studies have included comparison groups of L1 writers. From our data we conclude, therefore, that the “loose coordination” referred to in analyses of Spanish-speaking student texts is not a result of L1 transfer, but rather a characteristic of texts produced by novice L1 and L2 writers. The principal differences between the Spanish writers in their L1 (1S, 4S, and SP), which reveal novice writer developmental patterns, were the increasing rates of production of W/T-unit, W/Clause, and subordinate clauses from 1S to SP. As well, there was a gradual decrease from 1S to SP in the production of T-units with nominal clauses introduced by a first person pronoun and a verb noting mental states (think, believe, etc). The chief differences between the United States students (NS) and the English professionals (EP), showing developmental factors in L1 English, were the professionals’ significantly greater W/T-unit, and an apparent increase in W/Clause. The EP also showed higher rates than the NS for all types of subordinate clauses, significantly so for participials. The EFL developmental factors revealed in the comparison of the first- (1E) and the fourth-year (4E) L2 students to the NS and the EP (Table 4) were a significantly greater number of W/T-unit and W/Clause in the EP texts, and a greater number of W/T-unit and W/Clause in the NS texts when compared with those of the 1E and 4E. In general, the Spanish learners of English showed lower rates of subordination in L2 English than in their L1 Spanish (comparison between Tables 3 and 4), with

Contrastive discourse analysis

the exception of non-finite gerundival clauses. The high rate of gerundival subordination produced by the 4E, even greater than that of NS, might point to a compensatory writing strategy, namely that of picking the salient -ing form for initial increased production of subordination (cf. SLA research such as that of Lightbown 1983). Finally, the Spanish 4E greater production of complex clauses (TOTCL/TU and FINCL/TU) than their approximate English counter parts (NS) appears to be a transfer factor. That is, the Spanish L2 preference for finite over non-finite subordination is consistent with their L1 tendencies, noted above as a contrastive rhetoric factor.

Notes * The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Secretaria de Estado de Universidades, Investigación y Desarrollo, in support of Craig Chaudron’s participation on this project in 1998, as Investigador Extranjero (SAB1995–0759). Dr. Chaudron also acknowledges a Mellon Research Fellowship from the National Foreign Language Center, Washington, D. C. for the support of preparatory work leading to his involvement in the project. . One excellent rhetorical study controlling for such factors is Taylor and Tingguang (1991). 2. First-year English Philology students at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, are required to have the proficiency level corresponding to the Cambridge First Certificate examination (approximately, high intermediate), and the Fourth-Year English Philology students, the level corresponding to the Cambridge Proficiency examination (approximately, low advanced to advanced). 3. The topics for the Spanish/English professional newspaper essayists (economy, war, computers, education, and health care) do not exactly match the topics chosen by the students, but both the professional and the student writers must argue for and against something. 4. As defined by Hunt (1965), a T-unit is an independent clause plus any other clauses which depend on it. 5. Biber and Reppen (1998: 150) state that Spanish “does not allow participial clauses or WH-clauses functioning as complement clauses,” but this is not correct in either case. Spanish can have participials functioning as complement (Me divierto jugando al tenis, ‘I enjoy myself playing tennis’) and also WH-clauses (No sabe qué debe hacer, ‘S/he doesn’t know what s/he should do). See Talmy (1996) for a discussion of differences between verbs of movement in Spanish and English. 6. While these results concur with those of Altenberg and Tapper (1998) and Granger and Tyson (1996) with respect to the lack of evidence for L1 transfer, they also accentuate the interesting possibility that L2 training and exposure to formal and informal registers could be a source of cross-linguistic variability in L2 writing. 7. A noticeable factor that limited the reliability of differences between these two groups is the quite large within-group variance (the square of the s.d.) seen in most of the Spanish measures, compared to much more consistent and low within-group variance for the EP. The degree of difference in variances between groups on RC and several other comparisons

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Neff, Dafouz, Díez, Prieto, and Chaudron were significant, thereby breaking the assumption of equal variances for reliable analysis of variance.

References Altenberg, B., and M. Tapper. 1998. “The use of adverbial connectors in advanced Swedish learners’ written English.” In S. Granger (ed.), Learner English on Computer, 80–93. London: Longman. Biber, D., R. Reppen. 1998. “Comparing native and learner perspectives on English grammar: A study of complement clauses.” In S. Granger (ed.), Learner English on Computer, 145–158. London: Longman. Biber, D., S. Conrad, and R. Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chafe,W., and J. Danielewicz. 1987.“Properties of spoken and written language.”In R. Horowitz and S. J. Samuels (eds.), Comprehending Oral and Written Language, 83–113. San Diego: Academic Press. Evensen, L. S. 1986. “Discourse markers in student writing: Exploratory analyses.” Trondheim Papers in Applied Linguistics II. Trondheim: Institutt for anvendt sprakvitenskap, 46– 77. Grabe, W., and R. Kaplan. 1996. Theory and Practice of Writing. London: Longman. Granger, S., and Tyson. 1996. “Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non-native EFL speakers of English.” World Englishes 15: 19–29. Hunt, K. 1965. Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels. Champaign, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English. Kaplan, R. 1966. “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.” Language Learning 16: 1–20. Lightbown, P. 1983. “Exploring differences between developmental and instructional sequences in L2 acquisition.” In H.W. Seliger and M. H. Long (eds.), Classroom Oriented Research in Second Language Acquisition, 217–243. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Lux, P., and W. Grabe. 1991. “Multivariate approaches to contrastive rhetoric.” Lenguas Modernas 18: 133–160. Montaño-Harmon, M. R. 1991. “Discourse features of written Mexican Spanish: Current research in contrastive rhetoric and its implications.” Hispania 47: 1: 417–425. Neff, J., E. Dafouz, M. Díez, R. M. Prieto 1996.“Information structuring in Spanish EFL university writing.” In R. Sola, L. Lazaro, and J. Gurpegui (eds.), XVIII Congreso de AEDEAN., 789–798 Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá. Quirk, R., et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Reid, J. 1990. “Responding to different topic types: A quantitative analysis from a contrastive rhetoric perspective.” In B. Kroll (ed.), Second Language Writing: Research Insights for the Classroom, 191–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reppen, R. and W. Grabe. 1993. “Spanish transfer effects in the English writing of elementary school children.” Lenguas Modernas 20: 113–128. Talmy, L. 1996.“The windowing of attention.” In M. Shibatani and S. Thompson (eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their form and meaning, 245–287. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contrastive discourse analysis Taylor, G. and C. Tingguang. 1991. “Linguistic, cultural and subcultural issues in contrastive discourse analysis: Anglo-American and Chinese scientific texts.” Applied Linguistics 12: 319–336. Werlich, E. 1983. Text Grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer. White, M. 1999. “Understanding headlines from the business press.” Tenure-track examination, Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Wolfe-Quintero, K., S. Inagaki, and H.-Y. Kim. 1998. Second Language Development in Writing: Measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center, University of Hawai’i. Yau, M. S. S. 1991. “The role of language factors in second language writing.” In L. M. Malavé and G. Duquette (eds.), Language, Culture and Cognition, 266–283. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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CHAPTER 16

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue A case study of academic essays in Venezuelan Spanish and English Elizabeth Arcay Hands and Ligia Cossé Universidad de Carabobo, Venezuela

The teaching of English to speakers of other languages throughout the world has led linguists and teachers together to probe into the intricacies of language and the human mind. As a result, a strong body of research that intends to explain how languages work, how they are learnt and how their systems interact during the process of learning has become available. So far, however, the emphasis has focused on one direction. It has focused on how the mother tongue influences the learning of the English language and the products of this process. With regard to the written language, the exploration of this relationship, which originated in the thoughts of Robert Kaplan opened the field of Contrastive Rhetoric in the late seventies. As it has become widely known, this field opened the way to study how cultures differ in the organization of their thoughts when languages are the medium for communication. Since then, the discipline has called the attention of many researchers and the studies have focused on how English differs from other languages, and how transference processes shape written texts when English is used as a second or a foreign language (see for example Connor and Kaplan 1987). Many contributions have been and can still be made in this sense, but what happens to the L1 once the individual has become academically literate, i.e. has mastered writing skills, in a second language? Is it possible for transference processes to occur in both directions? What kinds of changes occur, if any? Can they be empirically identified? So far, the issue of biliteracy has been mostly addressed to deal with the problems that arise when the learning of second language literacy skills has been somewhat unsuccessful (Montaño-Harmon 1991; Reppen and Grabe 1993; Jenkins 1990; Hornberger and Skilton-Silvester 1998), or to face the challenge of children’s bilingual education (see Landry and Allard 1992; Roca 1996; Baker 1996; Noguchi 1996; Freeman and Freeman 1997; Howard and Christian 1997; Dworin 1998, among others). The nature of the interchange that is created between the second language and the mother tongue, however, has been much less, if hardly, explored. In particular, one study that deals with this relationship is John Lipski’s (1996) study of CubanAmerican bilinguals. Lipski examines several reported changes in the use of Spanish as the mother tongue at syntactic and discourse levels, but looking only at different

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levels of fluency. Within the English speaking academic world, however, no studies about changes or differences in the use of Spanish as the mother tongue as a result of becoming academically literate in English have been found so far in the literature. Arcay (1996) — led by her experience with the teaching of academic writing skills to Venezuelan EFL teacher trainees conducted a study to examine the possible effects of the learning of academic English writing skills on the characteristics of the academic essays written in Spanish by these teacher trainees. In this study the academic essays written in Spanish by two groups of language teachers trainees were compared. One group was monolingual (Venezuelan Spanish) and the other bilingual (EFL). The procedures for the creation of the corpus were carefully controlled — previous knowledge of the subject-content, educational level, motivation and production sessions — and five different analyses were applied to study the interaction of linguistic, psychological, social and cultural aspects. The results pointed to interesting differences in some of the analyses. For example, with the analysis devised for the study of the orthographic sentence,¹ differences in the use and percentage of types of these sentences were found between the two groups. Also, a more homogeneous distribution of the types of sentences was found in the essays produced by the biliterate students and a higher use of different types of subordination was found in the monolingual ones. On the other hand, the rhetorical organization of the texts differed in the sequence and organization of the rhetorical typology of the texts. In our opinion, these results provided enough empirical data to take a step further in the exploration of the area of L2–L1 transference processes. Inasmuch as differences were found between the two groups of students’ texts, the next logical step was to analyze a similar type of text, but which could be regarded as model of the genre (Swales 1990). So this chapter presents the findings of the characterization of academic essays written by renowned monolingual and bilingual scholars in Venezuelan Spanish and in English (Arcay and Cossé 1998).

Written texts, discourse and genre analysis: A multidimensional approach Contextualized and multidimensional approaches for the study of written texts (Fairclough 1992; Huckin 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Hatch 1992; Biber 1993; Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1994) have emerged to deal with the complex nature of texts and to attempt to compensate for the problems that a single approach analysis poses for the characterization of texts. The core of these approaches could be regarded as the conjugation of the concepts of written text, discourse and genre analysis, an alternative for linguistic research that has been put forward by various scientists. In 1987, Enkvist somehow opened the way to use approaches of this type with the characterization of four methodological approaches for the applied linguist for the study of written texts. More recently, Huckin (1992: 86) characterizes contextualized multidimensional approaches, with four salient elements. In the first

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place, these approaches are regarded as inductive and not deductive and they do not subscribe to only one language theory. Instead, they are interdisciplinary and eclectic. Secondly, they try to take into consideration the context of situation as stated by Malinowski in his seminal work, without becoming overly speculative. In the third place, they are in favor of plausible interpretation rather than on formal proofs and they try to make a strong case for a certain point of view. Finally, they use multiple forms of analysis, both quantitative and qualitative.

The study Subscribing to a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach, this chapter reports on some selected findings of the exploratory study devised to examine samples of academic texts written in Venezuelan Spanish by monolingual and bilingual authors and to compare them with sample texts of the same genre written in English to detect possible effects of the learning of academic writing skills on the use of the mother tongue. The study follows the second stage of genre analysis procedures (Bhatia 1993; Paltridge 1997) in which texts that can be regarded as models of the genre are examined to detect characteristics for subsequent confirmations in larger corpora. It is multidisciplinary because it uses components from several disciplines: linguistics, psychology and sociology. It is multidimensional because it is based on the premise that several human dimensions converge and can be identified in written texts, and that the integration of the concepts of text, context, discourse and genre results in a multidimensional approach that allows the examination of written texts from several perspectives. A combination of four analyses originated in four basic language dimensions: linguistic, cognitive, cultural and social was used. But, as we have already explained, we are reporting only on two of the dimensions analyzed in the original study, due to the length restrictions of this chapter. The two selected analyses are the linguistic and the cultural. The linguistic analysis was carried out through the detection of frequency counts and resulting percentages of seven types of orthographic sentences (Arcay 1996), and the cultural one was devised with a modification of the rhetorical structure analysis (Kaplan 1983, 1984, 1987) to determine how rhetorical typologies are realized² in natural language texts.

The corpus As the corpus examined in the first study was created with academic essays written by EFL and Venezuelan Spanish teacher trainees, the procedure for the selection of the corpus³ of this study was first to detect academic essays which could be regarded as genre-texts. That is, texts that could be regarded as models of the genre academic essays or as typical representative examples of this genre (Bhatia 1993: 22). Commonly, genre texts are produced by professional and renowned authors of a discourse community. In our case, the production of renowned scholars, native speakers of Venezuelan Spanish and English, who belong to the academic community

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within the area of linguistics, was examined to detect academic essay genre texts so as to allow a comparison with the results of the previous analyses. An important clarification has to be made here. Since it was not possible to find an empirical definition of an academic essay in the literature, outside the undergraduate world, we worked out a definition to guide the selection of the texts, taking into consideration two basic aspects. The first one was the definition of a student’s academic essay. The second aspect addressed contextual elements such as the text’s purpose, function, its target audience and its possible relation to other texts. The resulting working definition of the academic essay was “a written composition independent from other texts, addressed to an academic audience, that is carried out by university students or scholars with the purpose of publication, in which the author’s opinion with regard to the topic is expressed”. The next step was to identify monolingual and bilingual scholars. For the purposes of the investigation, we considered a monolingual scholar one who does not speak or write in a language other than his/her mother tongue and whose academic training was carried out exclusively in his/her mother tongue. Likewise, we considered a bilingual author one who is fluent in a second language, is an independent producer of written texts and has been published in that second language within academic contexts. Accordingly, these characteristics define the term academic biliteracy introduced in this chapter. The following step was to select texts which could fit the definition of academic essay stated above, among the academic production of monolingual and bilingual Venezuelan and English speaking authors. The topic area of the texts was also taken into consideration for the selection and, as a result, the search focused on texts which dealt with language teaching and linguistics. Finally, three published academic essays were selected. Two were written in Venezuelan Spanish, one by a monolingual author (Urriola 1989) and one by a bilingual author (Páez Urdaneta 1985) and one written in English (McArthur 1996). The characteristics of the texts in terms of number of words and sentences per text were the following: Urriola 64 sentences and 1278 words; Páez Urdaneta 34 sentences and 844 words, and McArthur 45 sentences and 1035 words.

The analyses The two analyses reported in this chapter were performed with separate annotations of the corpus, one for each analysis.

The orthographic sentence The first unit of analysis, the orthographic sentence was annotated through the identification of coordinating and subordinating elements, words and expressions (Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE) (Royal Academy of the Spanish Language) 1985 and Quirk et al 1972) for the identification of the seven types of orthographic sentences (Arcay 1996). When cases of ambiguity arose, several criteria

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were adopted to regulate the choices throughout the corpus. For example, when the subordinating property of a word and/or expression became dubious it was considered a subordinator if and only if it could be replaced by another subordinator (see Arcay and Cossé 1998 for the criteria used in other cases). The taxonomy used for the identification of the seven types of orthographic sentences mentioned above originated in the three classical grammatical categories (RAE 1985 and Quirk et al 1972), and in the variations found in the orthographic sentences of the corpus of academic essays written by language teachers trainees (Arcay 1996). These variations consist of four additional combinations of main and subordinate finite verb clauses. In what follows, we will describe the sentence nomenclature used in this study and the resulting four additional combinations. Also, we will provide examples, both in Spanish and English for the new categories proposed in the taxonomy. The definitions of the simple sentence, the compound sentence and the simple subordination sentence correspond to the ones provided by RAE (1985) and Quirk et al. (1972) for simple sentences, complex by coordination sentences and complex by subordination sentences, respectively. The definitions for the remaining four types are provided below. Sentences with coordinated subordination. These are sentences which have one and only one main clause and two or more subordinate clauses linked only by syndetic or asyndetic coordination. Examples: Spanish (bilingual author) La problemática con respecto a las sociedades bilingües o multilingües es bastante compleja, no tanto porque la enseñanza idiomática sea estructuralmente diferente, sino porque las estrategias educativas deben ajustarse a dos o más contextos socio culturales de actuación. ‘The problems that arise in bilingual or multilingual societies are quite complex, not because language teaching is structurally different, but because educational strategies should adjust to two or more sociocultural contexts of action.’ English Again, it might be thought that wide tolerance of neologisms could lead to divergence in usage and finally to breakdown in communication.4 Sentences with subordinate subordination. Sentences which have one and only one main clause and two or more subordinate clauses linked by a subordinator, thereby establishing a chain of subordination. In Spanish, Seco (1972) mentions up to four levels of subordination, but with no further elaboration on their characteristics. Examples: Spanish (bilingual author) Evitar esas dos connotaciones implicaría afirmar que la lengua nacional es un español ideal, que por lo mismo no se habla en ninguna parte.

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‘To avoid those two connotations would imply to state that the national language is an ideal Spanish that, for the same reason, is not spoken anywhere.’ English If people believe that the structure of any language is closely related to innate mental processes, they may not admit how readily and how harmlessly the structure can be modified. Sentences with mixed subordination. Sentences which have one and only one main clause and three or more subordinate clauses, of which two, at minimum, are linked by coordinating elements and one by a subordinator. Examples: Spanish (monolingual author) En los días que corren, la mayor ambición de un intelectual criollo vendría a cifrarse en que lo llamaran maestro — y si fuese en el tono en que se lo decimos a Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, nada mejor. ‘These days, the highest ambition of a Venezuelan intellectual would be centered on being called ‘maestro’ — and if it is in the tone we use to address Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, nothing would be better’. English All such forms could be considered ‘good grammar’, in the sense that they fit in with common patterns of English, and are immediately understood, although they do not happen to be ‘good usage’. Compound complex sentences.5 Sentences which have two or more main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses. Examples: Spanish (bilingual author) El centrolectalismo idiomático está relacionado, al menos, con una vivencia comunitaria concreta, aunque la variedad lingüística que representa no está libre de la impersonalización cultural: “la lengua de la capital — afirma Jespersen — se convierte en menos y menos determinada por su localidad y se convierte en más y más la lengua de la nación”. ‘The idiomatic centrolect [sic] is related at least to one concrete experience in a community, even though the linguistic variety that it represents is not free from a cultural impersonation: “the capital’s variety — states Jespersen — becomes less and less determined by its location and becomes more and more the nation’s variety.” ’ English The vocabulary and morphology of English could be simplified to a degree if certain constraints were removed: it would be largely a question of allowing certain common patterns to become more general, with the final disappearance of the irregular forms.

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue

Rhetorical organization The second unit of analysis, “rhetorical organization”, was carried in two stages. The first one addresses the relationship that is created between texts and the contexts in which they are produced. In this sense, we agree that context — defined as the dynamic interchange of linguistic, metalinguistic and non linguistic elements occurring in text production — plays a very important role in rhetorical organization analyses (Rajkay Babó 1995; Huckin 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Bhatia 1993; Hatch 1992). As a result, four contextual elements were also taken into account to complement the characterization produced by the identification of rhetorical units (rus): the title of the text, the production context, the purpose, the targeted audience, the expected rhetorical typology and the rhetorical typology found in the texts. The second stage consisted in the detection of explicit and implicit markers of speech act sequences, first to identify discourse units (du), and second to examine discourse unit sequences and propositions to identify rhetorical units (ru)⁶. A “du‘’ represents the functions that propositions and the logical relationships created among them perform in the text. A ru represents identifiable groupings of discourse units which are equivalent to what has been called a “speech event” (Coulthard 1985) or a “template” (Hatch 1992) in the literature for the analysis of spoken language. The use of the term rhetorical unit was considered appropriate for the analysis as it aimed at the characterization of the rhetorical organization of written texts, however, the possibility of finding a less generic and more descriptive term in the future is opened. Finally, to compensate for the subjective nature of this analysis⁷ and to guarantee the possibility to replicate the multidimensional study, a definition of each of the 16 discursive units and 10 rhetorical units found in the corpus was developed (see Arcay and Cossé 1998). And, as the rhetorical typology that was found in the three texts analyzed in this chapter was argumentation, in what follows, we will present examples of the rus which best illustrate its essence (Weasenforth 1995): claims, concessions and refutations. We would like to add that the speech act sequences that were identified as dus, and that, in turn, originated the rus could not be presented in full due to length restrictions. Claim: according to Toulmin (1958) and Weasenforth (1995) a claim is a general proposition that is put forward in an argument with the intention of substantiating it. Claims can also be regarded as conclusions whose merits the author of the argument is seeking to establish. Examples: Spanish (monolingual author) Y de que si, al hablar de los estudios del magister, en otras partes, se conserva la forma original del vocablo, será por una deliberada evocación de la época en que la lengua de Roma constituyó una aspiración a la unidad de la cultura occidental. ‘And that if, when talking about master’s degrees in other parts of the world, the original form of the term is kept, it is due to a deliberate consideration of the time in which Rome built an aspiration to unite western culture.’

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English Many of these irregularities could be regularized, and I see no profound reasons why such a reduction of irregularities should not be carried out. Concession: a proposition is deemed as a rhetorical unit of this type when it admits the existence of positive elements which may go against the argument presented by the author, but at the same time it indicates why these elements are not enough to invalidate the defended argument. Examples: Spanish (bilingual author) Circunscribiéndonos al caso del país monolingüe, la problemática es menor pero no irrelevante. ‘If we only consider the case of the monolingual country, the problems are less, but not irrelevant.’ English It is easy to see where the complications of structure lie, but it may be difficult to reach agreement on the best means of simplification. Refutation: a proposition is deemed as a rhetorical unit of this type when an opposite view to the defended argument is invalidated. Examples: Spanish (bilingual author) ¿Qué lengua enseñar? La pregunta pudiera parecer innecesaria en un país monolingüe como Venezuela, Colombia o Argentina. No así en países bilingües como Paraguay o Perú. ‘What language should be taught? The question could seem unnecessary in a monolingual country such as Venezuela, Colombia or Argentina. It would not be so in bilingual countries such as Paraguay or Peru.’ English There is a strong traditional belief in the existence of a language faculty, but this view of language can be challenged.

Results The orthographic sentence We can observe in Table 1 that simple sentences and sentences with simple subordination were the ones most used by both Venezuelan authors, and that there is a low use of compound sentences and sentences with coordinated subordination. However, the fact that there is a difference of 14.6% in the use of simple sentences between them points to a first divergence between the two texts. We can also observe that the text written by the bilingual author presents a more homogeneous distribution of the types of sentences used, in contrast to the text written by the monolingual

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue Table 1. Percentages of orthographic sentences per type of author Type of orthographic sentence

Monolingual (%) Bilingual (%)

English (%)

SIMPLE COORDINATED Simple Subordination Coordinated Subordination Subordinated Subordination Mixed Subordination COMPOUND COMPLEX

45.0 3.3 36.7 0.0 16.7 5.0 3.3

33.3 15.6 13.3 2.2 4.1 2.2 28.9

23.5 8.8 26.5 8.8 2.9 17.6 11.0

author which mainly concentrates on simple sentences and sentences with simple subordination. Another interesting element that arises is that in the monolingual author text the use of coordination in all its forms only reaches 6.6%, whereas in the bilingual one it reaches 28.6%. That is, the use of coordination by the bilingual author is four times higher. If we compare this percentage with the percentage of the use of coordination in the English text (46,7%), we can see that even though this latter nearly doubles the bilingual author percentage, the proportion of the difference is such that it can be seen as a similarity rather than a difference. A third interesting aspect that arises is the use of sentences with subordinated subordination. The monolingual author text presents a 16.7% of sentences of this type whereas the percentage in the bilingual author text is 2.9%. In other words, it is nearly eight times higher. If we compare the bilingual author and the English one, we can see that both percentages are very similar (4.1% for the English text and 2,9% for the bilingual one). We want to argue that this similarity points to an intuitive judgment about sentence length in Spanish. Sentences written in Spanish have been regarded as longer in average than the English sentence. However, in this study the average of number of words per sentence was similar for the three authors: 19.97 for the monolingual author, 24.82 for the bilingual and 23 for the English one. Would it be possible then that this judgment originates in the higher use of subordination and not in the actual length of the sentences? Evidently, more evidence is needed, but it seems a promising line to explore.

Rhetorical organization The analysis of the relationship between the texts and the contexts in which they were produced showed similar results with the exception of the Venezuelan Spanish monolingual author text, which evidenced a different typology from the one which was expected according to the initial purpose of the text (see Table 2). The purpose was to praise the life and work of a renowned Venezuelan linguist, so what was expected was that reasons were given to support the admiration and respect given to the linguist. Instead, this purpose was carried out through the argumentation in favor of the use of the term “Maestro” (equivalent to the Latin term “master”)

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Table 2. Context, purpose and rhetorical typology of the texts Type of author

Title

Context

Purpose

Rhetorical typology expected/found

Venezuelan Spanish Bilingual

¿Qué lengua enseñar? ‘What language to teach?’ (Páez Urdaneta 1985).

Appendix of a book about communicative mother language teaching

To argue for the communicative teaching of Venezuelan Spanish as L1

Argumentation/ argumentation

Venezuelan Spanish Monolingual

Maria Teresa Rojas. (Urriola 1989)

To praise the Section of a book in honor of a life and work Venezuelan linguist of the honored Venezuelan linguist

Expository cause and effect/ argumentation

English

Towards Designer English. (Mc Arthur 1996)

Comment section of a specialized language teaching journal

Argumentation/ argumentation

To argue for the regularization of the English language

to address this renowned linguist. Forty-four sentences out of 64 were used for this part of the argument and the rest dealt with biographical information about the life of the linguist. If an indirect strategy for textualization was used for a clear task, could it then be considered as an ample digression? Again, more evidence is needed but it would be quite interesting to explore the use of this strategy for textualization in Venezuelan Spanish. With regard to the type and frequency of basic rhetorical units of an argument, Table 3 shows that use of claims was very similar in all texts. In general, the types of units found in all the texts were similar with the exception of “refutation” which does not appear in the monolingual Spanish text. The use of “concession” units was similar in the texts of the Venezuelan bilingual and English authors and it doubled the frequency of the Venezuelan Spanish monolingual. Concessions account for the recognition of only a partial validity of opposite arguments. Can this similarity then be regarded as the consequence of a raised consciousness on the part of the bilingual author towards the targeted audience? Could this be attributed to the learning of academic writing skills in English? Obviously, more texts need to be analyzed, but again it seems that it is worth to pursue this line of research. The total number of units raises an additional observation. The bilingual and the English authors used the same number of units in spite of the differences in number of sentences per text (34 in the bilingual and 45 in the English). The monolingual text, in contrast, evidenced the lowest number of rhetorical units and the highest number of sentences. As we see it, this finding opens an alternative to explore the relationship between moves and speech acts and the number of sentences used to textualize propositions in each language.

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue Table 3. Rhetorical unit type and frequency per text Rhetorical unit Claim Refutation Concession Evaluation Reason Purpose Effect Definition Narration Peroration TOTAL

Monolingual

Bilingual

English

6 0 2 2 3 0 0 0 1 1

5 2 4 2 3 1 0 1 0 1

6 1 4 0 7 0 0 0 0 1

15

19

19

Conclusions The characterization of academic essays written in Venezuelan Spanish by monolingual and bilingual scholars and in English allowed the detection of similarities and differences. These differences, in turn, allow us to argue for the need to continue exploring along this line of research. In spite of the small size of the corpus, we believe that L2–L1 transference processes should be further explored. That is, the changes that apparently occur in the use of the mother tongue after the individual has become literate in a second language should be examined very carefully at different levels. Two reasons support this belief. The first one deals with the results of the investigations and stems from the fact that other empirical findings point in the same direction, Arcay (1996) with academic written texts and Lipski (1996) with the oral production of Cuban-American bilinguals. The second deals with the consequences and has to do with a growing need to raise consciousness in any L2 learner with regard to the righteous characteristics, values and use of their own mother tongue. The demands that the academic world imposes on speakers of English as a second or other language to be published may lead to privilege English and its characteristics over any other language. It is not a matter of choosing one language over the other or transforming one into the other. For us, it is a matter of being fully aware of the characteristics of each one and of mastering the production of both. If not, a subtractive bilingualism, such as the one reported by Landry and Allard (1992) in Franco-Americans in the United States, may occur instead of an duly enrichment of the learner. With regard to the analytical capacity of the units, we want to comment about the taxonomy for the orthographic sentence. We believe that it can become a powerful tool to describe natural language texts. Indeed, by allowing a finer discrimination of the several combinations for subordinate and coordinate finite verb clauses in seven

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types of orthographic sentences, more information about textualization processes in different languages could become available. Also, the previously mentioned preconceptions existing in both languages with regard to the length and use of orthographic sentences could be further explored. We do recognize that a certain amount of eclecticism had to be allowed to carry out the analyses. And with it a certain amount of theoretical rigor had to be sacrificed. Yet, what this study aimed was at the confirmation of the need to continue exploring written texts through more than one or two perspectives, and, if possible, at the opening of new alternatives for insights. We claim that those aims could be accomplished. The use of a multidimensional perspective allows several aspects of human nature to be present simultaneously in the resulting description. With them a description more in agreement with textual nature is possible, opening, at the same time, alternatives to sharpen our judgments in relation to where similarities and differences can actually occur. That, we argue, can help us find ways to a better understanding of the written text and academic biliteracy.

Notes . In spite of certain resistance found in the literature towards the use of the orthographic sentence as a unit if analysis (Enkvist 1987; Hoey 1991; Robert Kaplan personal communication June 15 1994), the findings of the study with student’s academic essays (Arcay 1996) provided support to propose a taxonomy for the several combinations of hypotactic and paratactic clauses found in these texts, which were not described in the grammatical sources consulted (Real Academia Española 1985; Seco 1972; Quirk et al. 1972). 2. We considered the possibility of using the procedures suggested by the Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1987). However, as this theory also presents problems of disambiguation (Moore and Pollack 1992) and the intention of our analysis was to attempt several descriptions in one single study, we opted for the adaptation of Kaplan´s analysis. 3. Following Bhatia (1993), the search for the texts to build the corpus was guided by the following principles: that the texts were addressed to an academic audience within the social sciences field; that the texts were aimed at defending the author’s point of view on an educational issue and that the texts were self-contained, i.e., that they did not depend on any other texts for their comprehension. 4. This sentence was regarded as a sentence with coordinated subordination because the presence of ellipsis is acknowledged (. . . finally [could lead] to breakdown in communication.) We presented it as an example because no other sentences of this type were found in this text. However, it existence in English was confirmed when other texts were examined. 5. The initial nomenclature given to this type of sentence in Spanish was the equivalent to the term “Mixed Sentence”. However, as the term “mixed sentence” may be somewhat misleading, and as the term “Compound-Complex” has been used in manuals for the teaching of writing skills, we decided to adopt this latter for the English version of this study. 6. Many of the criteria selected to guide this analysis stems from the work of Weasenforth (1995) and Toulmin (1958).

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue 7. As it has been well discussed in Hallidays´s work (1985), logical relations in language are expressed grammatically as different forms of hypotaxis and parataxis; however, it is possible that paratactically expressed relations be interpreted as hypotactic forms when they do not fit the rules that govern this type of union, and that no explicit indicators of this relationship be found.

References Arcay Hands, Elizabeth. 1996. Análisis multidimensional de textos académicos escritos en español de Venezuela. [Multidimensional analysis of academic texts written in Venezuelan Spanish]. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. Arcay Hands, Elizabeth and Ligia Cossé. 1998. Análisis Multidimensional de Ensayos Académicos. Valencia, Venezuela: Dirección de Medios y Publicaciones de la Universidad de Carabobo. Baker, Colin. 1996. Foundations of Bilingual Education and Biligualism (2nd ed.) Bristol, PA: Multilingual Matters. Bhatia, Vijay. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman. Biber, Douglas. 1993. “The multidimensional approach to linguistic analyses of genre variation: An overview of methodology and findings.” Computer and the Humanities 26: 331– 345. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad. and Randy Reppen. 1994.“Corpus-based Approaches to Issues in Applied Linguistics.” Applied Linguistics 15(2): 169–189. Connor, Ulla and Robert B. Kaplan. (eds.). 1987. Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Coulthard, Malcolm. 1985. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.) London: Longman Duranti, Alessandro and Charles Goodwin (eds). 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dworin, Joel E. April 1998. “Biliteracy development: Perspectives from research in children’s reading and writing.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Diego, California. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1987. “Text linguistics for the applier: An orientation.” In Ulla Connor and Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 73–86. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. “Discourse and text: Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis.” Discourse and Society 3(2): 193–217. Freeman, Yvonne and David E. Freeman. 1997. Teaching Reading and Writing in Spanish in the Bilingual Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. Spoken and Written Language (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatch, Evelyn. 1992. Discourse and Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoey, Michael. 1991. Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hornberger, Nancy and Ellen Skilton-Sylvester. 1998. “Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Diego, Ca.

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298 Elizabeth Arcay Hands and Ligia Cossé Howard, Elizabeth R. and Donna Christian. 1997. “The development of bilingualism and biliteracy in two-way inmersion students.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago, Il. Huckin, Thomas. 1992. “Context-sensitive text analysis.” In Gesa Kirsch and Patricia.A. Sullivan (eds.), Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, 84 –104. Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press. Jenkins, Susan. 1990.“Second language literacy: Functional competence for the future.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Reading Forum. Sarasota, Florida. Kaplan, Robert B. 1983. “Contrastive rhetorics: Some implications for the writing process.” In Aviva Freedman, Ian Pringle and Janice Yalden (eds.), Learning to Write: First language/ second language, 139–161. Selected papers from the 1979 CCTE Conference, Ottawa, Canada. New York: Longman. Kaplan, Robert B. 1984. “Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education.” In Sandra McKay (ed.), Composing in a Second Language, 43–62. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. Kaplan, Robert B. 1987. “Cultural thought patterns revisited.” In Ulla Connor and Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 text, 9–22. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Landry, Rodigue and Réal Allard. 1992. “Subtractive bilingualism: The case of Franco-Americans in Maine’s St. John Valley. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 13(6): 515–544. Lipski, John. 1996. “Patterns of pronominal evolution in Cuban-American Bilinguals.” In Ana Roca and John B. Jensen (eds.), Spanish in Contact: Issues in bilingualism, 159–186. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Mann, William, C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1987. Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization. USC/Information Sciences Institute Technical Report RS-87–190, Marina del Rey, California. Mc Arthur, Douglas. 1996. “Towards designer English.” ELT Journal 50(4): 344–346. Montaño-Harmon, María Rosario. 1991. “Discourse features of written Mexican Spanish: Current research in contrastive rhetoric and its implications.” Hispania, 74(2): 417– 425. Moore, Johanna D. and Martha E. Pollack. 1992. “A problem for RST: The need for multilevel discourse analysis.” Association for Computational Linguistics 18(4): 537–544. Noguchi, Mary G. 1996. Adding Biliteracy to Bilingualism: Teaching your child to read English in Japan. A guide for parents. Monographs on Bilingualism No. 4. Osaka, Japan: Japan Association of Language Teachers. Páez Urdaneta, Iraset. 1985. La enseñanza de la lengua materna: Hacia un programa comunicacional integral. Caracas: IUPC. Paltridge, Brian. 1997. Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Quirk, Randolph, Sydney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman. Rajkay Babó, Ana María. 1995. “El problema de la frontera entre el texto y el contexto.” Paper presented at the I Coloquio Latinoamericano de Analistas del Discurso, Caracas, Venezuela. Real Academia Española (RAE). 1985. Esbozo de una Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

Academic biliteracy and the mother tongue 299 Reppen, Randy and William Grabe. 1993. “Spanish transfer effects in the English writing of elementary school students.” Lenguas Modernas 20: 113–128. Roca, Ana and John B. Jensen (eds). 1996. Spanish in Contact: Issues in bilingualism. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Seco, Manuel. 1972. Gramática Esencial del Español. Madrid: Aguilar. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toulmin, Stephen. 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urriola, José Santos. 1989. “María Teresa Rojas.” In Iraset Páez Urdaneta, Fernando Fernández, and Luis Barrera Linares (eds.), Estudios Lingüísticos y Filológicos en Homenaje a María Teresa Rojas. Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar. Weasenforth, Donald. 1995. Evaluating Argumentative Essays. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. American Language Institute, University of Southern California.

CHAPTER 17

Texts as image schemas A cross-linguistic study Tânia Gastão Saliés Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

Existing cross-linguistic analyses of discourse relate the structural format of discourse across languages to historic literary traditions and cultural communication styles favored by different communities (Clyne 1981, 1987, 1991; Dantas-Whitney and Grabe 1989; Oliveira 1997). Clyne notes that German writers’ frequent use of nominalizations, syntactic complexity, and overloaded phrases is rooted on educational practices that nurture and value demonstrations of knowledge. DantasWhitney and Grabe, in their study of ten newspaper editorials in English and in BP, link the format of editorials in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to a style of high personal involvement. Likewise, Oliveira relates BP student writers’ preference for a more elaborated style to their view of time and to the educational system. According to her, Brazilians tend to view time as points that construe a circle and this view reflects on how these writers tackle a topic and use syntactic constructions. Her comparison of 90 compositions in BP and 90 compositions in English reveals that BP student writers mark geographic, historical, social, and economic entities significantly more than Americans. Also, as opposed to Americans, BP students grow up in a system that values formal, impersonal writing. Therefore, they tend to use personal pronouns with lower frequency when compared to Americans who grow up in a system that values the interaction between writers and readers. However, cognitive linguistics (Langacker 1991; 1995) has a great deal to offer to cross-cultural discourse studies. Recent developments in this field explain language phenomena on the basis of mental, perceptual and physical attributes that conjoin to form fixed gestalts. These gestalts provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, functioning as a reference point. They come to be when people are exposed to certain attributes with high frequency. This is what Lakoff (1990a) calls an image schema and this is how this study will approach the study of written discourse. When we analyze discourse using the notion of image schemas, we cannot oversee the aspects that give life to it such as syntax, morphology, the lexicon, and how they relate to sensorial experience and conceptual organization (Saliés 1997). These aspects dynamically overlap, forming the image schema. Duszak’s (1995) cross-linguistic investigation of prototype effects in news stories falls short from taking this approach. Instead, she relates English (van Dijk 1988), German and Polish news story prototypes to preferred communication

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styles and literacy traditions. Compared to English, Polish and German texts were less segmented, showed lengthier and more integrated paragraphs with explicit cohesive links, initial build-up of the setting, chronological cueing, longer sentences, elements of historical and contextual background, evaluative or predictive comments, and complex sentences with embeddings and elaborations. Similarly to the other cross-linguistic studies mentioned earlier, Duszack misses the relation between cognitive mechanisms and grammar, and how they overlap to form an image schema (Saliés 1997). This relation between grammar and cognitive mechanisms has been addressed in analyses of English discourse (Chafe 1994; Givón 1995; and Tomlin 1987), communication studies (Sperber and Wilson 1995), and cross-linguistic analyses of sentence processing (Bates and MacWhinney 1989). This body of knowledge also has a great deal to offer to cross-cultural discourse studies of the kind I take up here. Among other things, analysis of English discourse has indicated that lexical and syntactic structures function as basic processing directions that may speed or retard processing speed (Givón 1995). For example, “anaphoric connections are time-saving devices in the processing of coherent discourse” (Givón 1995: 105). It has also indicated that notions such as “activation cost” can explain the given–accessible–new distinction (Chafe 1994). That is, given information is information that was already active at a specific point in time, being therefore “least costly in the transition from T1 (the first point in the time-line) to T2 (a second point in time-line) because it was already active at T1. Accessible information is somewhat more costly, and new information is the most costly of all, presumably because more mental effort is involved in converting an idea from the inactive to the active state” (Chafe 1994: 73). Finally, it has demonstrated, from the perspective of communication studies (Sperber and Wilson 1995), that the accessibility of contextual assumptions relates to the cost of processing and is key to comprehension. In other words, relevance is directly related to comprehending in the least time possible. Basically, these studies draw on the premise that working attention has a limited capacity (Baddeley 1990) and that both production and comprehension of discourse are subject to that limitation. If the person wants to process material in parts of the visual field, which are not under the focus of attention, it is necessary to move the spotlight. This takes time, being thus costly. Reflecting these advances, recent models of the writing process have underscored the role of working memory in the production of written discourse (Hayes 1996; Grabe and Kaplan 1996; and Kellog 1996). Cross-linguistic studies on sentence comprehension, for their part, have related processing strategies to the typicality of linguistic cues that, in turn, are language specific. For instance, experimental work by Bates, McNew, MacWhinney, Devescovi, and Smith (1982) has revealed that English speakers rely primarily on word order to construe meaning, interpreting even second nouns in non-canonical word orders as subjects. In another instance, Kail (1989) has indicated that French speakers rely on SV agreement and cliticization to choose actors and Bates and

Texts as image schemas

MacWhinney (1989) have pointed out that, in Spanish, the accusative preposition, SV agreement, and clitic agreement, in that order, are the strongest cues to actor assignment. In addition, Hoover (1992) and Hunt and Agnoli (1991) have demonstrated that because of cognitive constraints imposed by linguistic and contextual devices, English typically employs shorter sentences and is more context dependent than Spanish. Specifically, Hoover (1992) has found that his 12 Spanish-speaking subjects could understand embedded sentences with two subordinate clauses while his 12 English-speaking subjects could not. According to him, because English is a wordorder dependent language, the position of the words in the sentence determines their grammatical roles, forcing English speakers to employ a late closure processing strategy. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, employ a distributed processing strategy since the verb and its clitics and the prepositional system carry information about the grammatical relationships among the noun phrases in general (cf. Cuetos and Mitchell 1988). Other reading time experiments have also provided strong evidence for the relation between the amount of information the linguistic system offers and the processing strategy users apply (Just and Carpenter 1992; Anderson 1995). If enough information is provided, processing occurs on-line. If not, processing is either delayed to the closest boundary where integration is possible or it takes place immediately and has to be modified according to incoming information. Either late-closure strategy or subsequent reinterpretations reflect a cost in reading time. Despite the relevance of these findings to the production and comprehension of discourse, cross-linguistic investigations have not extended them to the analysis of discourse. This is what this study sets out to do. In a multidisciplinary thrust, it addresses texts as image schemas, taking up the analysis of English and Brazilian Portuguese discourse in the light of cognitive linguistics and current findings about activation cost, working memory, and the relation between linguistic events and processing strategies. In that it does so, it addresses BP discourse, a language few published studies have analyzed. This approach to discourse analysis may enlighten our understanding of the role of language specific attributes in shaping discourse cross-linguistically. For that purpose, I will apply the image schema COMMUNICATIVE TEXT (Saliés 1997) to Brazilian Portuguese and English published expository texts. As I have mentioned, an image schema is a fixed gestalt. In the case of discourse, it consists of a description of a collection of events, linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, perceptual and rhetorical, their interrelations and thematic ground where each event relates to our organization of space and experience with language and communication. Specifically, Saliés (1997) COMMUNICATIVE TEXT is a metaphoric projection of the MOTION (Lakoff 1990a) schema and its elements SOURCE–PATH–GOAL–DESTINATION. As SOURCES (addressers) move in space to reach their GOALS (effective communication) and final DESTINATIONS (addressees), they combine linguistic events and cognitive, pragmatic, perceptual, rhetorical, and socio-cultural aspects of dis-

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course (the PATH). Each of these elements forms gestalts in its own right and has other sub-components. For example, the PATH element is a gestalt and breaks down into linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, perceptual, rhetorical, and socio-cultural attributes. These sub-components, further sub-divide into word order, inflections, relevance and cognitive effects, cost of processing and allocation of attention resources, literary and historical traditions. The sub-components within each component also group into gestalts. When language users activate the components and sub-components simultaneously, they construe the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT. Though the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema has been originally applied to describe sentencelevel phenomena, it has never been extended to the analysis of texts. Figure 1 illustrates this image schema using the notation of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991). The heavy lines indicate that each component has its own structure and that elements within each component group into gestalts themselves. The dashed lines indicate interconnection among the component structures. The arrow indicates the direction of energy flow and the heavy-line bar indicates simultaneous activation in time. Figure 2 breaks down the components of the PATH schema. According to Lakoff ’s Invariance Hypothesis (1990b), high-order cognitive structures like the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT override language differences because they reflect universal experiences with space and communication. It is the way in which languages organize and use the components of the image schema, mostly those of the PATH, that varies.

Method To get at the image schema of texts in BP and English, I observed the regularities of 20 institutional expository texts in each language. The texts1 are from five different sources: The Public Affairs Service of Petrobras, the state oil company in Brazil; Phillips Petroleum; Exxon; Shell; and Texaco. I labeled the texts “institutional” because their GOAL is to sell a positive image of the oil companies and their ORIENTATION is that of their publishers, the oil companies themselves. To select the texts, besides controlling for text type (exposition), genre (reportages and annual reports), and sub-genre (institutional), I also controlled for audience (oil industry businessmen, shareholders, and the general public), number of words per text (I paired texts in BP and English according to their number of words), and topic (company’s contribution to a sound environment and community life). This procedure kept the ORIENTATION-SOURCE-GOAL-DESTINATION components of the schema constant and allowed me to study PATH variations only. All texts had an introduction, body and conclusion and averaged 319 words. The total number of words in BP was 6,371 and in English 6,398. Specifically, I observed (1) the organization of syntax by manually coding and counting juxtaposed prepositional phrases, sentence length, attention unit length, and number of independent clauses; and (2) the organization of the lexicon by man-

Texts as image schemas

ually coding and counting the number of content words, and the use of types and tokens. Also, (3) I qualitatively observed the presence of word-order effects, namely head-modifier and head-complement relations, inflections, and structures that favor embedding and right branching. The selection of these events followed facts related to production and comprehension mentioned earlier (cf. Chafe and Danielewicz 1987; Biber 1988). For example, while attributes like a low type-token ratio may increase the ease with which readers comprehend, frequent use of right branching and lengthy sentences may decrease it. Data were analyzed quantitatively by means of descriptive statistics and qualita-

SOURCE PATH ORIENTATION GOAL DESTINATION

⇑ ⇓ SOURCE The writer as a member of a specific speech community

PATH Linguistic cues, pragmatic, cognitive, perceptual, rhetorical, and socio-cultural factors

GOAL To communicate a message at the minimum cost of processing

DESTINATION Readers as members of a specific speech community

ORIENTATION That of the writer, as the conceptualizer and member of a speech community Figure 1. Texts as image schemas: the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT (Saliés 1997)

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tively according to cognitive and pragmatic constraints, and the premises of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991). A two-tailed Mann Whitney U-test for independent groups compared the sums of ranks of each linguistic attribute in the two languages and verified their significance. Results were considered significant at the 0.05 level. All counts were normalized to 1000 words, except for the type-token ratio. This procedure neutralized any difference in length among texts.

Linguistic cues Word order Inflections Head-modifier sequencies Lexical variety and density Sentence length/attention unit length Independent constructions Juxtaposed PPs Pragmatic factors Relevance/cognitive effects Context dependency Interaction with reality Cognitive factors Cue validity and strength Cost of processing Allocation of attention resources Supra-linguistic schemas (MOTION, ACTION, EMOTION) Perceptual factors Shape Size Function Rhetorical factors Structural patterns Historical traditions Literary traditions

Figure 2. The PATH sub-component structure (Saliés 1997)

Texts as image schemas

Coding criteria Organization of the lexicon

This measure computes the type-token ratio of words and the number of content words in the data. While the type-token ratio reflects lexical variety, the number of content words reflects lexical density. The higher the ratio, the greater the lexical variety and the lower the number of repeated words. According to existing research, repetition is one of the structuring devices that bring to light the discourse focus of assertion (Johnstone 1987; Halliday and Hasan 1976). Actually, Johnstone refers to repetition as a crucial cohesive device because it creates “shared language” and evokes “shared memory” (p. 212). As such, it optimizes processing effort. Potentially, high lexical variety could cause comprehension constraints then. Every number, acronym, and abbreviation were considered tokens. Words that belong to the same paradigm (eg. production, productivity, producer) were counted as one type because paradigmatic relations are a form of repetition or cohesive tie (Chafe 1994; Halliday 1978; Johnstone 1987). Furthermore, they are facilitative given that a first mention (eg. to produce) activates the basic conceptual structure (Gernsbacher and Hargreaves 1988). The rate of access to the PRODUC cognitive domain increases at each subsequent mention of a member whereas the cost of activation decreases (see Anderson 1995, on the associative priming effect). Content words are open classes of words like verbs, adverbs and adjectives. By counting content words it is possible to assess to which extent the corpora rely on lexical density (Halliday 1989) to cue meaning. According to Halliday, lexical density is revealed by the number of content words per running words in a text. Because content words, as opposed to functional words, cue meaning through semantic memory, they facilitate recall (Sumby 1963). In this respect they may counteract the effects of high lexical variety by relating to users’ psychological reality and allowing top-down processing. Similar to repetitions, multiple synonyms, antonyms or collocations are cohesive ties and construe the topic as well (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Halliday 1978; Johnstone 1987). Furthermore, high frequency content words yield higher recall scores than those we rarely use (Sumby 1963; Hall 1954). The higher the number of associations they elicit, the lower the cost of activation (Noble 1952). Thus, a measure of lexical density indirectly indicates whether writers rely more on the lexicon or on grammar to cue meaning.

Organization of syntax

The organization of syntax consists of measuring the number of words per sentence and per attention unit (stretches of language between punctuation marks), independent clauses/sentences, and juxtaposed PPs. A more elaborate syntax structures information in discourse by indicating what is ground (dependent constructions) and what is figure (the foreground information or autonomous entity). It takes into account:

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Sentence length. This measure consists of counting the number of running words per sentence and averaging it for the total number of sentences in each text2 (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987). According to Chafe and Danielewicz, writers possess an intuitive concept of “normal sentence length” that generally averages 24 words per sentence in written English. Unfortunately, the type of discourse for which this normal length has been computed was not indicated. Length of attention unit. Following Chafe (1988; 1994) and Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), I assume that “written language has a covert prosody which is analogous to that of spoken language: both writers and readers assign pitch, stress, and pauses to language as they write and read it” (Chafe and Danielewicz: 110). This covert prosody establishes boundaries similar to what has been traditionally known as intonation units in spoken discourse and it approximately corresponds to “stretches of language between punctuation marks” (Chafe and Danielewicz: 110). Chafe refers to those units of written language as “punctuation units.” In this study, because such boundaries seem to reflect the extent to which language users can focus attention or keep an amount of information active, I call them “attention units.” Therefore, the category length of attention unit consists of counting the number of running words between punctuation marks and averaging it out over the total number of attention units in each text.2 According to Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), the mean length of attention units adds up to 9 words in written academic English discourse. Chafe (1988) found attention units that varied from 10 to 13 words in published academic discourse. Both studies found that most often these units comprise a single clause, but that they may carry only a phrase of some kind. These researchers theorize that the limited size of attention units (only moderately higher than those found in conversations — 6 words per unit) may reflect writers’ concern about their audience’s limited capacity of working memory. If writers expand the units too much, comprehension may be impacted. Right-branching constructions. This category consists of a normalized count of the number of instances in which two or more prepositional phrases appear in sequence. That is, the number of occurrences of juxtaposed PPs. This number is multiplied by 1000 and divided per the total number of running words. PPs that appeared as complements of verbs (indirect objects) were excluded from the tally. They are part of the verb sub-categorization and together with the verb constitute single mental structures. Because BP is a head-initial language, it favors the appearance of PPs or post-modifiers, and sub-categorization of this type, which led me to exclude them from the counting. Furthermore, I coded and counted only juxtaposed PPs because by being juxtaposed, they increase the length of sentences and may overload working memory.3 Independent constructions. These constructions foreground information, being autonomous conceptually. They may be independent clauses or sentences as (1) and (2) illustrate:

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(1) Our emphasis on risk reduction and emergency response capability reflects an organization wide dedication (Exxon 1990: 28). (2) The current policy calls for continuous improvement (Shell 1993c: 3). Similar counterparts for each of the measures were compiled for the Brazilian Portuguese data. Specific examples of how the data were coded can be found in Saliés (1997). Next I report the results of this investigation.

The COMMUNICATIVE TEXT in English and in BP The two-tailed Mann Whitney-U test on the rank sums of the attributes indicated that the two languages differed significantly in the way they organized sentences, attention units, juxtaposed PPs, content words, and independent clauses into textual gestalts. Table 1 summarizes the results, listing the counts per thousand words, ratios and medians of attributes. Because the texts used in the study failed to yield a normal distribution with regards to the attributes analyzed, results and the comparisons among the two conditions take the medians as the measure of central tendency and ranges as the measure of variability. Quantitative analyses are followed by qualitative analyses.

Table 1. Comparing BP to English institutional discourse ( p < 0.05; df = 1) ENGLISH

BP

Counts/ 1,000 words

RANK SUMS

Counts/ RANK SUMS 1,000 words

Syntactic organization Sentences Sentence length* Attention units AU length* AU per sentence Juxtaposed PPs Independent constr. Lexical organization

47 20 95 9 2 17 53

− 72402 − 468003.5 − 224.5 548

38 24 122 7 3 35 40

− 74751 − 500132.5 595.5 548 433

Type-token ratio ** Content words

0.50 611

454 602

0.46 553

366 218

* Medians

** Not significant

MANN-U P test

26951

0.000

280425.5

0.000

14.5 338

0.000 0.000

244 392

0.233 0.000

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Organization of syntax Figure 3 visually contrasts syntactic events in BP and English. It indicates that writers used more words per sentences in BP than in English. While BP sentences had a median length of 24 words (max=55; min=08), English sentences yielded a median length of 20 words (max=55; min=02). Furthermore, in English many more sentences grouped at the lower end of the length range (15–24) while in Portuguese they grouped at the center (17–31 words) with a slight tendency toward lengthier sentences (32–55 words). This difference is statistically significant (Mann-U test=26951; p<0.05). The number of sentences per thousand words provided extra evidence for the naturalness and frequency of use of sentence length in BP and English. BP used lengthier but fewer sentences (38: 1000) than English (47: 1000). To form its lengthy sentences, BP used more attention units (n=122) per sentence than English (n = 95). However, compared to attention units in English (Median = 9; max = 42; min = 1), attention units in BP were shorter (Median = 7; max = 32; min = 1). Furthermore, most attention units in the BP data stayed within the bounds of 7 words (51.4%) while in English 52.5% of them conformed to 9 words. We may be 95% confident that these results were not due to chance (MannU test=280425.500; p<0.05). Surprisingly, if we consider the range for use of juxtaposed PPs, BP showed a moderate number (35: 1000) of juxtaposed prepositional phrases. However, compared to English (17: 1000), BP presented a significantly higher number of two or more juxtaposed PPs. In addition, while in English sequences of three juxtaposed 140 Frequency count per 1,000 words

30

BP English

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Sentence

S. length

AU

AU length Juxt. PPs

Figure 3. Organization of syntax in English and BP

Indep.

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PPs were rare and sequences of four rather unusual, in BP they appeared more frequently. The ranges for each language were quite revealing. While texts in BP ranged from 14: 1000 to 54: 1000 juxtaposed PPs, texts in English ranged from 0 to 29: 1000. This tendency was statistically significant (Mann-U test = 14.500; p < 0.05). Use of independent constructions also seems to distinguish the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT in BP and English. While BP had a median of 40 independent clauses per thousand words (min = 25; max = 54), English had a median of 53 (min = 38; max = 70). The distribution of independent clauses confirmed the different ways in which English and BP used this attribute. Whereas 60% of the English texts had from 43 to 61 independent clauses per thousand words, 55% of the BP texts had from 31 to 39 independent clauses (Mann-U test = 338.000; p < 0.05).

Organization of the lexicon Table 1 also reveals how BP and English used the lexicon in the corpora. Those results are illustrated by Figure 4. Portuguese repeated words with a slightly greater frequency than English. That is, English had a higher type-token ratio ( = 0.55) than Portuguese ( = 0.46). Most BP texts (60%) tended to have a relatively low type-token ratio (0.36 to 0.51) while most English texts (60%) tended to have higher ratios (0.52 to 0.74). English not only used a somewhat more varied vocabulary in the corpora but also had higher lexical density than BP. In each thousand English words there were 611 that carried content as opposed to grammatical information whereas in BP there were only 553: 1000 that carried content information. Though BP tended to

Frequency count per 1,000 words

700 English BP

600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Type/token

Content

Function

Figure 4. Organization of the lexicon in English and BP

3

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have a high number of content words (550–590: 1000 in 75% of the texts), the range in English was much higher (the minimum in English corresponds to the median in BP = 554: 1000). Furthermore, while 70% of the English texts (n = 14) displayed more than 605: 1000 content words, only 30% of the BP texts had this number. A Mann Whitney U-test found that while the difference for number of content words is significant (Mann-U = 392.000; p < 0.05), the difference for the type-token ratio is not significant (Mann-U = 244.000; p > 0.05). In brief, length of sentences and attention units and number of juxtaposed PPs, independent constructions, and content words typically distinguished texts in the two corpora. BP texts used lengthier sentences, more attention units and juxtaposed PPs and fewer independent constructions while English had more content words. These results were not due to chance. Next, I take on the qualitative analysis to observe how the quantitative findings relate to cognitive, pragmatic and perceptual factors discussed in my literature review. Ultimately, the qualitative analysis investigated how morphology, word order, and right branching interplayed with these factors to get at the image schema of written discourse in the two languages. To do so, I use the descriptive tools of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991) and the principles of cognitive linguistics.

Morphology, word order, right-branching and the organization of discourse The morphological trappings in BP function as overt cohesive ties, keeping referents active or at least semi-active in readers’ minds. An example of this is provided in (3), an excerpt from Petrobras (1992b). Here, among other things, the entity petróleo (oil) is linked to the next clause by means of the MASC:SG trapping in transportado (it is carried: MASC:SG) and to the following clause by means of the clitic se in onde se transforma (where it is transformed). Thus, BP writers can rely on noun and verb morphology to connect entities in discourse, which leads them to avoid relying on lexical ties to cue meaning. Rather, they rely on grammar. It is a matter of economical motivation. (3) O campo de Rio Urucu, a 600 quilômetros the:MASC:SG field of river Urucu which is 600 kilometers de Manaus, concretizou, depois de mais de sete from Manaus, fulfilled: 3SG:IND after more than seven décadas de pesquisas, o sonho decades of research:PL:FEM the:MASC:SG dream:MASC:SG de produzir petróleo na Amazônia. of producing oil:MASC:SG in the:FEM:SG Amazon. É um óleo leve, excelente it is:3SG:IND an:MASC:SG oil:MASC:SG light excellent

Texts as image schemas

para a produção de derivados nobres, for the production of by-products:MASC:PL high-grade:PL transportado em longas viagens it is carried:MASC:SG in long:FEM:PL trips:FEM:PL pelos rios até a Refinaria de Manaus, by:MASC:PL rivers:MASC:PL until the:FEM:SG refinery:FEM:SG of Manaus onde se transforma where it:CLIT:3SG is transformed:3SG:IND em gasolina, diesel e outros produtos. in gasoline diesel and other:MASC:PL products:MASC:PL ‘The Rio Urucu field, 600 kilometers from Manaus, finally fulfilled Brazil’s dream of finding oil in the Amazon, after more than seven decades of prospection. The oil that Urucu produces is light and excellent for the production of high-grade byproducts. It is carried by river to the Manaus Refinery where it is processed into gasoline, diesel and other products.’ Example (4) further illustrates this interpretation. The past participle integrado (integrated: MASC:SG) relates to the head esforço (effort:MASC:SG) by means of the MASC:SG marking. Furthermore, the 3SG trapping links esforço to the verb pretende (intend) and denomina (call). Though non-finite clauses interfere in between esforço (effort) and its landmark denomina-se (calls: 3SG:IND itself: 3SG), esforço is kept active by means of the 3SG inflection. Furthermore, the 3SG clitic se (itself) reinforces the correspondence. (4) Este esforço integrado, this effort:MASC:SG integrated:MASC:SG que pretende that intends: 3SG: IND assegurar a integridade do to safeguard the:FEM:SG integrity:FEM:SG of:MASC:SG homem, compatibilizar a produção mankind:MASC:SG to reconcile the:FEM:SG production:FEM:SG com o meio ambiente e garantir a with the:MASC:SG environment:MASC:SG and to guarantee the:FEM qualidade de produtos e serviços, quality:FEM of products and services denomina- se Processo Petrobras de calls: 3SG:IND itself: 3SG Process Petrobras of Meio Ambiente, Qualidade e Segurança Industrial. Environment, Quality and Safety Industrial. ‘This integrated effort is called Petrobras Process of Environment, Quality and Industrial Safety. It not only assures the integrity of mankind but also reconciles oil production with environment protection and guarantees quality products and services.’ (Petrobras 1992c)

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Therefore, as the examples demonstrated, morpho-trappings and clitics establish a net of landmarks that keep trajectors at least semi-active in BP. Also, because in BP tokens encode different grammatical functions (gender, number, tense, aspect, mood), pronouns were scarce and NPs were rarely mentioned a second time. Morphology carried that information throughout discourse. English, on the other hand, has a less comprehensive morphological system. Consequently, it rarely combined different grammatical information in one single form. Rather, it resorted to different lexical items, mainly collocations and pronominal anaphors to weave “texture.” This increased lexical density. Example (5), an excerpt from Shell (1993c: 3), demonstrates this line of reasoning: (5) Experience has shown that the process to reach a well-balanced solution is often long and complex. Decisions have to be made on the most cost-effective means to achieve such a solution, frequently necessitating special research. Such a process may comprise a detailed inventory and investigation of the past activities and the environment in which they were conducted. This results in the setting of priorities and a plan based on the assessment of the environmental hazards involved, the significance of the impact and possible off-site migration of the pollutant. Instead of morpho-trappings, collocations (see the italicized entities) acted as cohesive ties. ‘Well-balanced solution’ relates to ‘most cost effective means’ that relates to ‘special research’ and so on. Actually, many more types were content words than function words. At the same time there was high lexical variety. These facts together reflect the role of the lexicon in the English data. Therefore, though the statistical test indicated a non-significant difference between the type-token ratio of the texts in the two languages, the English corpus frequently relied on content types and used a relatively low number of repetitions to cue meaning when compared to BP. Furthermore, word order effects may also relate to how the two languages organized discourse. According to Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991), relational configurations that follow the order of conceptualization optimize cognitive routines. That is, if trajectors (the autonomous entities) appear before landmarks (the dependent entities), the construal of a final composite structure requires less mental effort. This seems to be the case of BP. An example of this is provided in (6), an excerpt from Petrobras (1992c). Here the perceptually salient entity missão (mission) appears first and is further elaborated by entities that follow it, the landmarks principal (main) and da companhia (of the company). (6) a missão principal da Companhia the mission main of the Company ‘the company’s main mission’

TR

LM

LM (profile determinant)

Texts as image schemas

Examples (3) and (4) previously mentioned provide further evidence for the TRLM pattern in the BP database. Relational configurations like ESFORÇO integrado (integrated effort) and ÓLEO leve, excelente . . ., transportado . . . (a light and excellent oil that is carried . . .) display dependent entities last. Other entities were headcomplement relations like INTEGRIDADE do homem (integrity of humankind) or QUALIDADE de produtos e serviços (quality of product and services) that by nature display landmarks last. Therefore, Portuguese word order seems to optimize cognitive routines. Generally, both head-complement and head-modifier relations display trajectors (TR) first and landmarks (LM) last. This pattern allows interpretation to follow the order of conceptualization as demonstrated by the arrows in example (6). In English, on the other hand, head-modifier relations tended to appear with high frequency, even though English offers some options for putting modifiers after heads (as in N of N constructions) as well. In (7), an example from Shell (1993: 3), there are six sequences of this kind: Well-balanced solution Public authorities Special research

Detailed inventory and investigation Environmental hazards Past activities

In these head-modifier sequences, dependent entities appear first and autonomous entities last. For example, in ‘past human activities,’ until readers reach the trajector ACTIVITY, they have no idea about the structure the landmarks ‘past’ and ‘human’ elaborate. As the arrows in example (7) illustrate, the landmarks are stationary and cue ground. ACTIVITY, the entity that construes the topic and that cues figure at the highest level, appears last. (7) PAST

HUMAN

ACTIVITY

Thus, head-modifier sequences in the BP and English databases indicated two trends. In BP they favored the order in which entities were activated most of the time. In English, they frequently tended to require users to delay processing, until the autonomous entity was activated. This cognitive routine demands attention resources. The qualitative analysis also observed right branching and how it related to the organization of discourse in the two languages. Though both English and BP used right-branching structures, BP used much longer and more elaborate ones. Most texts in the BP corpus had at least one long sequence of juxtaposed PPs. These sequences, as examples (8) and (9) demonstrate, ground the figure they elaborate and develop the topic of discourse. They appeared as one of the devices BP used to lengthen its sentences and attention units. In (8) there are eight juxtaposed PPs (see in bold) and in (9) thirteen. Across BP texts, there were 7: 1000 long sequences simi-

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lar to the examples as well as frequent sequences of four juxtaposed PPs. In English, these sequences practically did not appear. Whenever BP texts used few clusters of PPs, they relied on non-finite clauses to develop the topic. These subordinate clauses, appeared with high frequency and, as much as juxtaposed PPs, lengthened BP sentences and attention units. This is illustrated in (10), from Petrobras (1992c). The paragraph opens with a subordinate clause that is followed by an independent clause. Then, a sequence of non-finite nominal clauses follows. The first past participle clause (ligado diretamente à presidência) indicates the result of the temporal process and combines the functions of a verb with that of an adjective. Similar to a verb, ligado (connected) expresses aspect and concludes the ACTION of the main verb. Similar to an adjective, ligado (connected) is inflected for gender and number (MASC:SG) and establishes correspondences with the entity órgão (division:MASC:SG). The second is a present participle clause whose verb procurando (trying) expresses an on-going process that took place after the main verb reuniu (brought together: 3SG) and that modifies it. Actually, it functions as an adverb and could be paraphrased by means of a coordinated clause: ‘Petrobras brought together the three areas and tried to integrate them to the mission of the Company.’ To complement procurando (trying), a series of infinitive clauses follow. (8) Petrobras (1992d): A Petrobras vem desenvolvendo projetos Petrobras has been developing projects de incentivo of incentive à vida natural, to the life natural à preservação to the preservation de espécies ameaçadas, of species endangered ao esporte to the sports ao ar livre outdoors AND à qualidade to the quality de bens e serviços. of goods and services ‘Alongside in-house programs in environmental preservation, Petrobras sponsors external projects to protect endangered species and fosters respect for our natural habitat. Other projects encourage participation in open-air sports and commitment to quality goods and services.’

Texts as image schemas

Because the non-finite clauses function as landmarks that specify the independent clauses (the trajectors), distributed processing is possible, optimizing the mental effort. In addition, content types and figures in the non-finite clauses generally connect to trajectors by means of verb and nominal morphology (see the example). Future quantitative research should perhaps code and tally non-finite clauses in BP corpora to check which of the two events — juxtaposed PPs or non-finite clauses — is the most frequently used as a right branching construction in BP. (9) Petrobras (1992e) O IMA/AM é também responsável the IMA/AM is also responsible pela emissão for the issuing das licenças prévias of the permits previous para as atividades to the activities de pesquisa e exploração sísmica, of surveying and exploration seismic [das] licenças [of] permits de instalação of installation para as atividades to the activities de perfuração of drilling de poços of wells E (AND) [das] licenças [of] permits de operação of operation para cada campo produtor to each well producer de petróleo. of crude oil ‘IMA/AM is also responsible for issuing permits for seismic exploration and surveying as well as for issuing installation permits for well-drilling activities and operating licenses for each oil-producing field.’

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(10) Consciente de que meio ambiente segurança industrial certain:SG that environment safety industrial e qualidade são interdependentes, and quality are interdependent:PL a Petrobras reuniu a coordenação DET Petrobras:SG brought together:SG the:FEM:SG coordination:FEM:SG destas áreas num único órgão, of these:FEM:PL areas:FEM:PLT into a single:MASC:SG division:MASC:SG a Susema, DET Susema, ligado diretamente à Presidência, connected:MASC:SG directly to the Chairman, procurando trying integrá-las à missão da Companhia: to itegrate-them:CLIT: 3PL:FEM to the mission of the Company produzir, comercializar e transportar petróleo . . . to produce, commercialize and transport crude oil para garantir o abastecimento do País. to guarantee the supplying of the country Furthermore, qualitative analysis also indicated that BP discourse frequently inserted non-finite clauses as well as restrictive relative clauses between the actor of the independent clause and the temporal process that related to it. In example (4) the subject este esforço (this effort) is set apart from the temporal process denomina-se (calls itself) by the restrictive relative clause que pretende (that intends) and by three non-finite clauses (see in bold). Despite the insertion, there is no ambiguity. Verb morphology and the clitic se keep the referent esforço active, as I have mentioned. On the other hand, the English corpus used independent constructions to develop the topic. Adverbial phrases and non-finite clauses appeared less frequently than in BP. Insertions of dependent constructions between the subject and the predicate were rare. As example (11)3 illustrates (Shell 1993: 3), independent constructions appeared as figures while dependent constructions surrounded them, providing the scenery and details of the ACTION: (11) Over the last decade, As understanding and aspirations with regard to protecting the environment evolved, Society has become increasingly aware of the impacts of past human activity. Shell companies recognise their responsibilities for their past activities, and where appropriate, act accordingly in compliance with prevailing legislation as a starting point.

Texts as image schemas

Experience has shown that the process to reach a well-balanced solution is often long and complex. Before I close this qualitative analysis, I would like to make a few comments about sentence length and attention unit length. In BP, sentences tended to be lengthy as examples (8), (9) and (10) demonstrate. They systematically right branched and presented dependent clauses between the subject and the predicate. However, the attention units that combined to form these sentences tended to be short. Most of them corresponded to clauses and, when they did not, they reflected constituent structure (see examples 4, 8, 9, and 10). Apparently, punctuation in BP helps readers to parse. In English, though sentences were shorter than in BP, as examples (5) and (11) demonstrate, they were formed by attention units that frequently carried more than one clause.

Summary

This study applied the schema COMMUNICATIVE TEXT to the analysis of BP and English texts. Results indicated that we may be 95% confident that the difference in the way BP and English corpora used sentence length, attention unit length, juxtaposed PPs, content words, and independent clauses did not occur by chance. Qualitative analysis corroborated these findings and indicated that while English used collocation of lexical content types to cue meaning, BP used lexical repetitions and grammar. The differences between BP and English texts apparently derive from linguistic differences in available anaphoric ties, including BP’s use of its extensive verb and noun inflections. They also seem to derive from the perceptual salience of autonomous entities in BP, a language in which heads normally precede modifiers. Finally, close analysis of the corpora also demonstrated that attention units in BP generally reflected clause or constituent structure while in English they tended to be multi-clausal. These attributes combine to form the English COMMUNICATIVE TEXT and the BP COMMUNICATIVE TEXT as illustrated by Figures 5 and 6. The co-occurrence of these attributes constitutes cases of “English texts” or “Portuguese texts” that reflect the image schema. The absence of one or more of these attributes in any given text would constitute an instance of variation within the schema. Actually, conceptualizers superimpose the variants or different cases and reify them into this abstract schematic structure of texts in English and BP as the arrows in Figures 5 and 6 illustrate. Because other sub-components of the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT interact with the PATH schema, there is a spread of cognitive categories that conjoin into the core gestalt. Variations within the schemas in the two languages will then naturally occur as the distribution of attributes across different texts in the sample attests4. All cases however reflect the image schema though some reflect the core schema more closely than others. There is not exclusion from membership.

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Discussion Findings of this study suggest that languages balance the way in which they distribute linguistic events across written discourse, aiming at optimal cognitive effects (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Sentence length, for example, appears to be a function of the cognitive effects yielded by linguistic attributes typical of different languages. Though the BP corpus used sentences of a median length of 24 words, it counterbalanced sentence length with a high number of brief attention units that resemble constituent or clause-like structures. It also repeated words and established correspondences among events by means of morphologic trappings. Both repetitions and morpho-trappings functioned as cohesive ties and facilitated the allocation of attention resources. Overt morphologic and lexical ties allowed BP to right-branch non-finite clauses and juxtaposed PPs, generally without ambiguity. Another characteristic of BP discourse that seems to counterbalance sentence length is word order. Head-modifier relations tended to appear in the order they are conceptualized. In other words, Brazilian Portuguese word order seems to favor online processing of written information. This interpretation is reinforced by the network of morphologic and lexical ties that keep referents active or semi-active as well as by previous research on sentence processing in other romance languages (Hoover 1992; Cuetos and Mitchell 1988; Hunt and Agnoli 1991). Apparently, sentence length is not a major constraint for production and comprehension in BP because other linguistic events combine to optimize cognitive routines. The English corpus, on the other hand, used sentences of a median length of 20 words. English short sentences seem to counterbalance the few morphologic resources as well as word order effects. The same is true of independent constructions and lexical density. English tended to rely on independent constructions, more than on non-finite clauses or juxtaposed PPs, to construe the topic. Actually, the number of short sentences reflects the preference for independent constructions as well as the high number of content words in English. The shorter the sentence, the less ground and the more figure participants it tends to have. The low number of juxtaposed PPs and non-finite clauses also reflects the few morphologic resources of English. When writers use right branching constructions in English, they cannot tie landmarks to trajectors by means of morphology. In addition, pronominal reference often gives rise to ambiguity. Short sentences, reinstatement of topic-related NPs, and few right branching constructions appear then as solutions. Furthermore, sentence length in English also seems to counterbalance the amount of information encoded in attention units. Though punctuation may be a matter of style and varies from writer to writer (see discussion under Method), results of this study yielded significant differences between BP and English. It is true that the English attention unit’s median length of nine-word complies with the limitations of working memory. However, it does not facilitate the management of attention resources as much as the BP’s seven-word attention units. Besides, clausal and multi-clausal attention units appeared more frequently in the English corpus

Texts as image schemas

Cases

The BP COMMUNICATIVE TEXT

LONG SENTENCES SHORT ATTENTION UNITS FREQUENT RIGHT BRANCHING EMBEDDED CLAUSES REPETITION OF TYPES SALIENCE OF AUTONOMOUS ENTITIES MORPHO-TRAPPINGS THAT KEEP REFERENTS ACTIVE FEW EXPLICIT ACTORS

Figure 6. The BP COMMUNICATIVE TEXT image schema

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Cases

The English COMMUNICATIVE TEXT

SHORT SENTENCES NINE-WORD ATTENTION UNITS FREQUENT INDEPENDENT CONSTRUCTIONS SOME NON-FINITE CLAUSES FEW EMBEDDED CLAUSES EXPLICIT ACTORS COLLOCATED TYPES RARE JUXTAPOSED PPS FREQUENT HEAD-MODIFIER SEQUENCES

Figure 7. The English COMMUNICATIVE TEXT image schema

Texts as image schemas

than in its BP counterpart. These units definitely require more effort from working attention than the short BP units. This matter deserves further investigation, specially by means of on-line studies. Findings of this investigation also suggest that to weave “texture” and establish correspondences among frequently used autonomous entities, English relies on the lexicon while BP relies on grammar. The lower lexical variety and lexical density in the BP corpus relate to the fact that BP encodes different grammatical functions in one token. For example, notions of aspect, tense, mood, gender and number appear in one form in BP. Besides, morphology keeps nominal reference under the focus of attention and makes the reinstatement of full NPs, nouns or pronouns unjustified. In many instances where English had to reinstate full NPs or use a pronoun, BP simply carried the notion in the morpho-trappings. Had BP writers reinstated the NPs or used pronouns, they would have been violating the Theory of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995), or else, they would have been forcing readers to go through unjustified processing effort. Thus, the lower type-token ratio and lexical density in BP seem to be functions of morphology and the Theory of Relevance. The above conclusions are supported not only by the analysis of the texts in this study, but also by other studies involving direct manipulation of processing strategies in languages closely related to Portuguese, namely Italian (Hunt and Agnoli 1991), Spanish (Hoover 1992; Cuetos and Mitchell 1988) and French (Kail 1989). Language specific morphology and word order pose cognitive constraints on sentence production and processing, as extensively demonstrated by previous crosslinguistic research (cf. Bates and MacWhinney 1989). In other words, different languages have different attributes that make texts exemplars of what Saliés (1997) called COMMUNICATIVE TEXT. A central case of the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT schema yields maximum cognitive effects, being cognitively more efficient than less central cases. It is the one that gives the schema its shape, is easier to use and remember, and motivates variations within the category by interACTION with other schemas and with the conceptualizer’s own model of texts. What I have been trying to stress is that, apparently, the way languages organize events in texts reflects what grammar allows users to process efficiently. Contrary to existing research that has related the presence of lengthy sentences, frequent embedding, and right-branching to literacy traditions and cultural values (Duszak 1995; Clyne 1981, 1987, 1991; Dantas-Whitney and Grabe 1989; Oliveira 1997), results of this study suggest that an “elaborated” style may also stem from what grammar allows vis-à-vis optimal relevance. This interpretation gains strength if we consider the structure of the languages that founded those very literacy traditions. Structurally, they are similar, though their cultural ground varies (e.g. the case of Portuguese and French). It gains even more strength if we consider that other morphologically complex languages like German and Dutch also present “elaborated” style (Clyne 1991; Duszak 1995) and have literacy traditions that differ from those of BP. Thus, grammar seems to play a considerable role. This conclusion, similar to Hunt and Agnoli’s (1991), recasts the Whorfian Hypothesis as a psychological hypothesis of

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language performance and contributes toward the understanding of an issue that has been in the linguistic forum for decades. Finally, though this study has focused on institutional expository prose, its results may be generalizable to other sub-types of expository texts or genres. The effects head-modifier relations and morphology yield in BP and English derive from structural-cognitive facts about the two languages. As such they should hold across genres. Besides, the typical use of lengthy sentences in BP has already been confirmed by research on academic essays (Oliveira 1997). Short sentences in English have also been indicated by Chafe and Danielewicz (1987). Thus, the COMMUNICATIVE TEXT appears to be a general model of linguistic description. Research on other genres may provide further evidence. I caution readers, however, that textual analysis is only an indirect tool to investigate psychological processes. Since research in the field has neglected on-line experiments on sentence processing in Portuguese, future studies should focus on the cognitive strategies at work during BP discourse production.

Notes * I thank the State of Rio de Janeiro Foundation for Research (FAPERJ) for partially supporting my participation in the 24th. University of Wisconsin Linguistics Symposium. . Because of space limitations, further detail about the database, the methodological procedures, and data analysis can be found in Saliés (1997). 2. Descriptive statistics computed medians and not means because of the uneven distribution. The median length of sentences roughly reflects the level of syntactic complexity given that the number of words generally relates positively to the number of dependent clauses. 3. In their study of sentence processing in Spanish, Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) and Hoover (1992) discuss how right branching devices, similar to juxtaposed PPs, may overload working memory. 4. Other dimensions of the image schemas have been analyzed and appear in Saliés (1997).

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Tânia Gastão Saliés Lakoff, G. 1990a. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, G. 1990b. “The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image schemas?” Cognitive Linguistics 1(1): 39–74. Langacker, R. 1991. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. 1995.“Possession and possessive constructions.” In J. R. Taylor and R. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, 51–80. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Noble, C. R. 1952. “The role of stimulus meaning in serial verbal learning.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 43: 437–446. Oliveira de, Lúcia Pacheco. 1997. Variação Intercultural na Escrita: Contrastes Multidimensionais em Inglês e Português [Intercultural Variation in Writing: Multidimensional Contrasts in English and Brazilian Portuguese]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pontifícia Univerdade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil. Petrobras. 1992a. “Petróleo um Velho Conhecido.” Meio Ambiente, Qualidade e Segurança [Environment, Quality and Safety]. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Petrobras Sercom, Serviço de Relações Institucionais. Petrobras. 1992b. “Conheça a Produção de Petróleo na Amazônia.” Conheça a Produção de Petróleo na Amazônia [Production of oil in the Amazon]. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Petrobras Sercom, Serviço de Relações Institucionais. Petrobras. 1992c. “Esforço para Preservar o Futuro.” Meio Ambiente, Qualidade e Segurança [Environment, Quality and Safety]. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Petrobras Sercom, Serviço de Relações Institucionais. Petrobras. 1992d. “Incentivo à Vida Natural.” Meio Ambiente, Qualidade e Segurança [Environment, Quality and Safety]. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Petrobras Sercom, Serviço de Relações Institucionais. Petrobras. 1992e. “A Preocupação com o Meio-ambiente.” Conheça a Produção de Petróleo na Amazônia [Production of oil in the Amazon]. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Petrobras Sercom, Serviço de Relações Institucionais. Saliés, G. T. 1997. Texts as Image Schemas: A crosslinguistic analysis of discourse in the light of cognitive linguistics. Dissertation Abstracts International (UMI) 59 (2): 0473. Bell and Howeel # 98–24448. Shell International Petroleum Company, Ltd. 1993a.“Existing operations.” The Test of Tomorrow: 6. London, UK: Shell Centre. Shell International Petroleum Company, Ltd. 1993b. “Past activities.” The Test of Tomorrow: 8. London, UK: Shell Centre. Shell International Petroleum Company, Ltd. 1993c. “Shell initiative” The Test of Tomorrow: 3. London, UK: Shell Centre. Shell International Petroleum Company, Ltd. 1995., “Case study — environmental conservation.” Shell and the Environment: 852. London: Shell Centre. Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd edn.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sumby, W. H. 1963. “Word frequency and serial effects.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 1: 443–450.

Texts as image schemas Tomlin, Russel. 1987. “Linguistic reflections of cognitive events. In Russel Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, 455–480. Amsterdan and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Van Dijk, Teun. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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CHAPTER 18

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities* Ruth A. Berman Tel Aviv University

1. Introduction This chapter considers two facets of text production in developmental perspective: The structure and content of subject and predicate phrases as differentiating between the discourse genres of narrative versus expository (Section 2) and forms of usage as distinguishing between linguistic registers in spoken versus written discourse (Section 3). Here, genre refers to a type of text, in line with Swales (1990), who defines genre as a “distinct category of discourse of any type, spoken or written” (p. 33); and register refers to type of linguistic expression and level of language use, in line with Martin’s (1985) characterization of register as “the expression plane of genre”.¹ Two main proposals underlie this study. On the one hand, genre distinctions will be early to emerge, with clearly differentiated linguistic markers that may broadly correspond across different languages. In contrast, register-appropriate distinctions between spoken and written usage tend to be late school-age developments and they will be realized by forms of linguistic expression that are highly languagespecific. As background to analysis of the functioning of phrase-level structures in different types of texts, note that any mapping between linguistic forms and discourse functions can be related to specific levels of structure. These can be ranged from bound morphemes and particularly from the “word” as the minimal relevant unit functioning for any type of discourse through to the text as a whole, as set out in Table 1. Detailed analysis of all these levels lies beyond the scope of the present study, but some examples should clarify the main idea. In inflectional morphology, grammatical marking of tense-aspect distinctions critically affects the temporal texture of narrative texts from an early age in comparing languages with rich aspectual distinctions like Spanish with Hebrew, which marks only tense inflectionally (Berman and Slobin 1994). Shifting from one tense-aspect category to another in different languages serves the discourse purpose of distinguishing foreground from background elements of the text (Hopper 1982; Tomlin 1987). Further, use of bound

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Forms

Functions

MORPHOL

Bound morphemes: roots, stems, affixes

Grammaticized tense-aspect and agreement, transitivity, causation, negation, etc.

WORD

Closed class items; N,V, A; discourse markers; multi-lexemic set expressions

Register distinctions; semantic specificity in expressing, e.g., evaluative comments, locative trajectories, temporal relations

PHRASE

NP VP PP AP configurations

Head-modifier elaboration, objectspecification, event-conflation, spatiotemporal detailing

CLAUSE

Predicate/argument-adjunct constellations and orderings

Form and direction of information flow, topic– comment relations, focus, agent– undergoer perspective, local grounding

CLAUSELINKAGE

Juxtaposition, coordination, finite and nonfinite embedding, nominalizations

Isolated utterances > sequential chaining of series of events > syntactic packaging of event-complexes embedded in network of background states, attendant circumstances

GLOBAL SYNTAX

All of the above

Textual cohesion and connectivity, text-level foreground– background distinctions, encapsulations, segmentation

Note: This breakdown is adapted from a paper on form–function relations in narratives (Berman 1999).

morphological forms in preference to more analytic options for expressing accusative and genitive case are an important indicator of formal, literary register in Hebrew (Cahana-Amitay and Ravid 2000). Lexical selection is critical to register distinctions, contrasting the colloquial vocabulary of everyday speech with more formal, literary, or erudite styles. In English, for example, the distinction between the “little words” of informal, basic Germanic-origin vocabulary with less common, more learned polysyllabic items of Graeco-Latinate origin is a criterion of literacy and level of schooling (Anglin 1993). Type/token ratios and the semantic specificity of lexical items change dramatically as a function of development, while choice of lexicon distinguishes text types and discourse functions as well as registers. For example, narratives encode the main eventline by dynamic ACTION verbs, while stative verbs serve for background purposes of evaluation; expository texts in general and academic prose in particular rely more on abstract nominals than other types of discourse; and extensions of

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meaning from more basic, concrete reference are found in more mature and formal texts rather than in juvenile or conversational usage (e.g., a verb like drive will serve beyond the context of physical transportation in the sense of ‘motivate’). The level of phrase-internal structure is the main concern of the present study, which compares the form and content of noun-phrases and verb-phrases in narrative and expository texts produced in speech and writing by schoolchildren of different ages compared with adults. As for clause-linkage, this has been discussed in the literature from a developmental as well as genre-linked perspective (e.g., Berman 1997a; Berman and Slobin 1994: 538–554; Gayraud, Jisa, and Viguié 1999; Haiman and Thompson 1988). Such studies show that “syntactic packaging” increases as a function of age, literacy, and in written versus spoken language both in amount (defined as more clauses per “sentence” or some other unit of clause-packaging) and in type (e.g., more embedded clauses, more nonfinite participial and gerundive subordination). The idea of “global syntax” goes beyond individual and adjacent clauses as expressing local connectivity. It characterizes the devices selected for marking segmentation of, for example, a narrative into scene-setting versus plotline events, into episodes and sub-plots, into background and foreground across the entire text. And it includes reliance on rhetorical options such as syntactic parallelism and lexical repetition or reformulation, dialogue, quotations, and digressions which are marked by appropriate linguistic means. In crosslinguistic and crosscultural perspective, one might predict that the “lower” the level, or the smaller the unit under analysis, the greater the variation that will be found. It is known, for example, that languages differ most markedly in their morphology and lexicon, whereas it makes sense that features of clause-linkage and global text structure will have more in common across different languages. A major challenge to the field of discourse analysis is to achieve a motivated integration between bottom-up linguistic categories at the level of word, phrase, clause, and clause combining, on the one hand, and top-down analysis of global text structure, on the other. This should illuminate the interaction between the hierarchical structure of overall organization of information in a given piece of discourse and the linear flow of information as the discourse unfolds online.

1.1 Data base The present analysis, as noted, focuses on the intermediate level of phrases, in the hope of eventually linking this to the smaller unit of words and the higher level of clauses. The study reported on here examines what we take to be a fairly typical subset of 256 Hebrew-language texts produced by Israeli schoolchildren and adults.² The full study consists of four different texts produced by 16 subjects at four levels of schooling: gradeschoolers aged 9–10 (Grade IV), junior-highschoolers aged 12–13 (Grade VII), high-school students aged 16–17 (Grade XI) and university graduatestudents majoring in the sciences and humanities. All subjects are native-speakers of Hebrew from monolingual, middle-class, educated backgrounds.

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Each of the 64 subjects produced four different texts, two narratives and two expository texts, one written and one spoken in each of the two genres, all sharing the same general theme of situations of conflict. For the oral narrative elicitation, subjects were asked to tell a friend (someone of their choosing whom they know well from the same class or neighborhood) a story about a quarrel or fight which they had been involved in. For the written narrative, they were asked to write a composition giving an account of a different personal experience of a fight or quarrel. For the oral expository elicitation, subjects were asked to present their ideas about the topic of violence in schools as though they were giving a talk in class, and for the written exposition they were asked to write a composition discussing the topic of violence in schools. Each subject was met with twice, with a week or more between meetings. The order in which texts were elicited was balanced, one written and one spoken, one narrative and one expository at each session, e.g., Group A produced first narrative written and then expository spoken at Session 1, and first narrative spoken and then expository written at Session 2, while Group D produced first expository written and then narrative spoken, then expository spoken and narrative written.³ As noted, the Hebrew data formed the background to a larger sample collected from schoolchildren and university students in different countries (Berman and Verhoeven 2002). The present analysis discusses initial findings along the dimensions of: Genre — narrative versus expository texts; Modality — written versus spoken texts; and Development — age and level of schooling. — 4th-grade, 7th-grade, and 11th-grade schoolchildren compared with adults. Analysis starts by discussing noun phrases functioning as subjects and verb phrases functioning as predicates in narrative and expository texts (Section 2) and then proceeds to consider modality distinctions and the factor of register (Section 3) in the Hebrew data-base. Methodological and crosslinguistic implications of such a study are then considered (Section 4).

2. Subjects and predicates in narrative versus expository texts In order to identify genre distinctions in narrative versus expository texts, the two major phrase-level constituents of subjects and predicates were isolated. There were both principled and practical reasons for selecting these two domains of analysis. In principle, taking these two elements of verb-argument structure at the level of the single clause makes it possible to throw light on the interaction between arguments and predicates, between nominals and verbals, and between nouns and verbs in a way which to the best of my knowledge has not yet been done in developmental perspective. Prior research also suggests that subject selection on the one hand, and verb-class and verb-phrase structure, on the other, are critical for inter-genre distinctions. Besides, there is quite extensive earlier research on both noun phrase and verb phrase constructions in Hebrew, both in general linguistic terms and in language acquisition and development. Finally, the lower and higher levels of an-

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alysis — that of the word and that of clause-combining — are at the center of ongoing research in crosslinguistic perspective (see note 3). We are currently evolving discourse-motivated categories for analysis of different types of lexical items and classes of clause packages to apply across languages, text-types, and modalities. The phrase-level analysis presented here starts by describing noun phrase structures in Hebrew, from null subjects to pronouns and lexical NPs (Sections 2.1.1 to 2.1.3) and how these are distributed in the data-base (Section 2.2), followed by description of predicate constructions include verbless nominal clauses, copular constructions with the verb be, and finite compared with nonfinite lexical verbs (Sections 2.3.1 to 2.3.4), and how these are distributed in the texts analyzed (Section 2.4).

2.1 Types of Hebrew noun phrase constructions Three categories of analysis were identified for Noun Phrases in general, and for Subject Noun Phrases specifically: (a) different classes of null subjects; (b) personal and impersonal pronouns; and (c) lexical noun phrases at four levels of complexity.

2.1.1 Null subjects

Hebrew can be characterized as a “mixed” null subject or (S)VO language (Berman 1980, 1990). Its grammar licenses subjectless clauses in far more environments than languages like English or French, but less than Spanish or Italian, as in (1)–(6). – Person-Inflected Verbs in Past and Future, 1st and 2nd Person, e.g., (1) Ze haya pa’am še sixakti im Itay pugim ve ani amarti lo. it was once that played: 1SG with Itay marbles and I told: 1SG him ‘It happened once when I was playing marbles with Itay, and I told him . . .’ [Efi, boy, Grade IV, spoken narrative] (2) “Az ma ta’asi še ani holexet?” le-moxorat ra’inu next-day saw: 1PLUR so what will-do: 2FEM that I go?” et ha-mora ha-meargenet. the teacher organizing ‘ “So what’ll you do about (the fact) that I am going?” The next day wesaw the teacher in charge (of organizing)’ [Natalie, girl, Grade VII, written narrative] – Impersonal Constructions, e.g., (3) Axar kax ze nigrar le-riv, im loh mafridim yeladim . . . afterwards it is-pulled to fight if not separate:PLUR kids . . . carix le-harxik et ha-yeled le-shavua. must to-remove the kid for week ‘Afterwards it turns into a fight, if somebody doesn’t separate kids, one of them must be taken out of school for a week’ [Eyal, boy, Grade VII, written expos]

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– Same-subject 3rd person verbs in coordinate and subordinate clauses, also Topic elision in juxtaposed clauses, e.g., (4) Ze haya lifney be-erex xodesh, xaver sheli higia le-bet-ha-sefer sheli, siper li al eyzeshehu mikre . . . kol ha-zman shel ha-makot, afilu yeled exad loh hitarev, loh hifrid, afilu loh kara la-menahel. ‘It was about a month ago, a friend of mine came to our school, told me about some-sort of fight . . . All the time of the fight, not even a single kid interfered, (did) not separated [them], (did) not called the principal.’[Imri, boy, Grade XI, spoken narrative] – Non-finite embeddings (infinitives, participials), e.g., (5) Ma’arexet ha-xinux crixa le-hipatax haxuca el ha-mosadot še metaplim be-alimut kdey le-camcem et ha-tofa’a. ‘The school system ought to-open-up outwards to the-institutions that deal:PLUR with violence in-order to-restrict the phenomenon’ [Avi, man, Biblical studies major, spoken expository] (6) Ani yashavti ba-hafsaka ba-kita, mexin shi’urim. ‘I sat: 1SG during-recess in-the-classroom, preparing my-lesson.’[Yoni, boy, Grade XI, written narrative]

2.1.2 Pronouns

Hebrew has a rich range of personal pronouns, which occur as free morphemes in subject position (nominative case) and as bound suffixes on prepositional case and adverbial markers elsewhere. These include the following categories: – Personal, deictic (1st person, singular or plural, inflected) for person in past and future. – Personal, anaphoric (3rd person), singular hu ‘he’, hi ‘she’, plural hem ‘they’. – Impersonal: ze ‘it, this, that’, indefinite pronouns, e.g., person-inflected verbs can occur with or without surface subject pronouns (as in ani amarti ‘I told: 1SG = I told” versus sixakti ‘played: 1SG = ‘I played’ or ta’asi ‘2SG:will-do:FM = ‘will-you (FEM) do’ in examples (1) and (2) respectively). Other examples of personal pronoun subjects are given in (7), from the oral narrative text of Natalie, a girl in Grade VIII., and of an impersonal pronoun subject in (8), from her oral expository text (7) a.

Kol ma še hi amra li ani shamarti et ze be-sod. ‘And all that [ = whatever] she told:FM, SG me I kept: 1SG it as (a) secret’ b. Anaxnu xaverot, aval kvar loh haxi tovot. ‘We (are) friends, but not the best any more.’

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities

(8) Alimut ze davar nora meod, ze yaxol ligrom le-merivot ve lif ’amim ze yaxol ligrom gam le-mavet ‘Violence it [ = is] a very terrible thing, it can cause fights and sometimes it can cause even death’

2.1.3 Lexical nouns or noun phrases

The third class of nominal constructions contain a lexical head, and can be ranged on several levels of structural complexity depending on number and complexity of the head modifiers, from “bare” or simplex nouns to NP’s which include coordinate and subordination constructions (in Hebrew, invariably post-head, except for quantifiers). These possibilities are illustrated in examples (9) through (12) from the written expository texts produced by adult subjects. (9) Simplex “bare” NPs — a single noun, with or without the definite marker ha-: a. Yeladim eynam mishtakrim. ‘Kids don’t get drunk.’ [Ran, man] b. Ha-teguva yexola liheyot alima. ‘The-reaction may be violent.’ [Dorit, woman] (10) Level One complexity — noun with functor, e.g., demonstrative, possessive: a. Ha-gormim ha-lalu makifim yeladim. ‘The-factors the-those = those factors encompass children’ [Oved, man] b. Tipul axer nidrash. ‘Treatment other = other treatment is-required [Dana, woman] (11) Level Two complexity — single adjective, compound noun, genitive phrase: a. Ha-element ha-miluli mitbate be-xax še . . . The-element the-verbal = the verbal element is-expressed by . . .’ [Tami, woman] b. Recax Rabin hu behexlet . . . Murder Rabin = the Rabin assassination it [ = is] certainly . . .’ [Ella, woman] (12) Level Three complexity — with phrasal, clausal, and/or coordinated adjuncts: a. Sugim nosafim shel alimut be-vatey sefer hem alimut shel morim . . . Further types of violence in schools are violence of teachers . . . [Leor, m] b. Yeladim še gadlu be-sviva loh alima hem ezraxim tovim yoter . . . Children that grew-up in a non-violent environment are better citizens [Shlomi, man]

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c.

Misgeret xayenu ha-alima milulit ve fizit yoceret ‘The verbally and physically violent framework of our lives creates mahut enoshit brutalit ha-xoderet el toxo shel bet-ha-sefer (a) brutal human quality which impinges upon the school’ [Batya, woman]

The example in (12c) shows that the same breakdown of types of Lexical Noun Phrase structures applies to postverbal complement or object noun phrases, and to the full range of arguments and adjuncts which in Hebrew typically take the form of prepositional phrases. The present analysis, as noted, considers only grammatical subjects, most typically the initial preverbal element in Hebrew, as a basically SVO language, since these are particularly critical in distinguishing different types of discourse.

2.2 Distribution of subject noun phrases The first set of findings concerns the distribution of Subject NP’s in the narrative compared with expository texts of Israeli schoolchildren and adults. Since these analyses are based on a subset of the data, to which statistical analysis was not applied, they are not tabulated as quantitative breakdowns.⁴ However, the trends reported here are quite robust across subjects and age-groups and are confirmed by subsequent larger-scale analyses.⁵ Note, first, that null subjects account for one-third to a half of all clauses in the narrative texts, with rather higher figures as a function of modality (more in written than in spoken narratives) and of age (from 45% in 4th-grade written narratives to nearly 60% among adults). In contrast, fewer of the expository texts contain nullsubject clauses, particularly among the younger, gradeschool children. So there is a clear genre-based differentiation from 4th grade on in overall proportion of subjectless clauses in narratives compared with expository texts. Even more striking are the differences in the syntactic contexts and discourse functions for these null subjects. First, in the narrative texts, the most favored environment for subject elision is with verbs inflected for person in past and future tense, 1st and 2nd person — examples (1) and (2) above. In expository texts, in contrast, null subjects occur mainly in impersonal constructions, as in the examples in (3) and in the written expository text of a 4th-grader who says that violence is a bad thing ki yexolim lehipaca ‘ . . . because can:PL be-hurt = because people are liable to get hurt’ (the full text is given in example (37d) in Section 3.2.1 below). Another kind of impersonal construction that is very common in expository texts at all ages are modal predicates followed by infinitival complements, e.g., carix lid’og ‘have to-care = one must take care, care should be taken’, efshar lifgoa ‘possible to-hurt = someone could get hurt, people can get hurt’ (Reilly, Baruch, Jisa and Berman 2000). In contrast, null subjects are less common in expository texts for syntactic-packaging in same-subject coordinate or finite and nonfinite subordinate clauses, as in examples (4) and (5).

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities

This trade-off between personal versus impersonal contexts for subjectless clauses in Hebrew narrative versus expository texts provides an important genredependent diagnostic. It highlights the intimate, personalized nature of personalexperience narratives compared with the more generalized, detached, and impersonal character of expository prose, a distinction which is clearly expressed by gradeschool children (Berman and Nir, in press). Developmentally, subjectless clauses also differ in their discourse functions. Among the younger children, they occur mainly where grammatically required, in the context of verbs inflected for person and in predicate-initial existential clauses. Among older subjects, adults and high-school students, subject elision serves increasingly for the dual purposes of (mainly narrative) clause-linkage or textual connectivity and for topic maintenance, as was demonstrated for the Hebrew frogstory sample (Berman 1990; Berman and Slobin 1994). Consider, for example, the excerpt from the oral narrative of a male high-school teacher in (13), where null subjects are indicated by zeros. (13) Ha-menahel nixnas 0 carax, 0 carax, 0 carax. the-principal entered, 0 yelled, 0 yelled, 0 yelled axarey she-hu gamar licroax, kama axat ha-talmidot, 0 hivhira lo . . . ‘After (that) he finished to-yell, stood-up one of the girls, 0 informed him . . .’ This deliberately clipped, elliptical style of reference by means of null subjects as a device for topic elision is favored by some of the Hebrew-speaking adults in both this sample of personal experience narratives as in the frogstory picture-based narrative texts. It is never found in the texts of schoolchildren. Another striking genre-distinction in subject breakdown emerged in use of pronouns. Again, from 4th-grade up, 1st person pronouns occur, as expected, far more in narrative than expository texts irrespective of age (around 20% across agegroups). Where 1st person pronouns do occur in expository texts, they perform quite different discourse functions. In narratives, they refer to the narrator as protagonist, in expository texts of adults, they occur in illustrative anecdotes about personal experiences with the topic under discussion (violence in schools), or they are attached as personal commentary with cognitive verbs, in such expressions as ani xoshevet ‘I think: 1FEM’ or ani meniax ‘I assume’, ani to’en ‘I claim’. Second, for Hebrew-specific reasons, personal subject pronouns in general occur with higher frequency in speech than in writing. This reflects the more normative register and the denser, less redundant style of written language. Person-marking inflections on 1st and 2nd person verbs in past and future tense typically occur without an overt subject pronoun in written more than in spoken Hebrew, even though a pronoun is grammatically licensed in these contexts in Hebrew, unlike in more strictly “prodrop” languages like Italian or Spanish. In general, the bulk of all clauses (as high as 80%) in both types of texts have either null or pronominal subjects across age-groups. This trend is particularly marked in

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the narrative texts, where only 10% to 15% of all clauses have a lexical NP subject, as compared with between one-quarter to a third of the expository texts. Reliance on lexical subjects thus provides another diagnostic for genre distinctions from gradeschool up, and provides strong Hebrew-based evidence for Chafe’s (1994) claims about the general favoring of “light subjects” in narrative discourse. True, Chafe defines the notion of a “light” subject in functional terms, as “carry(ing) a light information load, as is appropriate for starting points” (1994: 85), whereas the criteria adopted here are structural, from NP’s of “level three complexity” as heaviest via pronouns down to null subjects as lightest of all. Here, as elsewhere, one would expect a strong overlap between discourse function and linguistic form. Distribution of lexical subjects also reveals a developmental change. “Heavy” or complex noun phrases like the those illustrated in (12) above account for around 15% of all subjects in the adult expository texts (and for around half of their lexical subjects in these texts), but they are rare in even the written expository texts of 4thand 7th-graders. High school juniors appear closer to the adults than to the younger children in their use of heavy or more complex NP subjects, as in other domains of text-construction. In sum, in the sample analyzed here, subject NP structure and content distinguishes very strongly between narrative and expository genres, it reveals some differences between spoken and written usage, and it reveals clear developmental trends, as follows. (1) In contrasting genres, we find (a) more null subjects in narrative texts, more lexical subjects in expository texts; (b) null subjects in narrative texts occur with verbs inflected for first and second person, in expository texts in impersonal constructions; (c) personal pronouns abound in narratives as against impersonal pronouns, mainly the generic ze ‘it, this, that’, in the expository texts; (2) in the contrast between speech and writing: (d) subject omission with personinflected verbs is commoner in written than spoken texts; (e) written texts have more, and heavier noun phrases than in the spoken language; and (3) in development: (f) null subjects serve the discourse purposes of clause linkage and topic elision among older speakers and writers, but occur mainly where grammatically required in the texts of the younger subjects; and (g) older subjects rely more on heavy noun phrases than younger children, whose noun phrases include at most one or two modifiers.

2.3 Types of predicate constructions in Hebrew The second analysis undertaken to demonstrate genre distinctions concerns predicate constructions. To this end, verb phrases were compared along three dimensions: (a) “nominal” or verbless predicates and clauses with various forms of be as a main verb versus “verbal” clauses with lexically specific verbs; (b) clauses with finite verbs marked for present, past, or future tense versus nonfinite clauses with infinitivals or participles; and (c) as a third criterion, simplex predicates with a single verb versus complex verb phrases with modal and aspectual operators.

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities

2.3.1 “Nominal” clauses = present tense existentials and copular constructions

This heading includes two types of typically Semitic constructions. The first, illustrated in examples (14) to (16), are exisential and possessive constructions which in Hebrew, as a non-habere language, are formed with a generic existential marker yesh ‘(there) be’ or its negative counterpart eyn in present tense, corresponding to the existential forms in Turkish, var and yok respectively. – Predicate-initial existentials and possessives constructions, starting with the existential particle yesh ‘there is’ or its negator eyn ‘there isn’t’ , e.g., (14) Kol od yesh alimut ba-olam. ‘As long as be [ = there’s] violence in the world.’ [Yoni, boy, Grade XI, written expository]; (15) Yesh li xavera še kor’im la Hila. be to-me friend that call:PLUR her Hila ‘I have a friend called Hila.’ [Liron, girl, Grade IV, spoken narrative] (16) Yesh yeladim še stam marbicim exad la sheyni ve eyn lahem be kids that just hit one another and not-be to-them siba. reason ‘There are kids that just hit one another and they don’t have any reason.’[Tal, girl, Grade VII, Spoken Expository] Copular constructions in the present tense take the form of verbless or “nominal” clauses typical of Semitic languages, since present tense has no tensed element equivalent to be in Romance or Germanic languages (Rubinstein 1968). Either zero or a pronominal copy of the subject NP links subject and complement, in such constructions as examples (17) through (19). – Subject-initial attributive or equasional constructions with zero or a pronoun between subject And Complement, e.g., (17) Alimut ze davar nora. violence it thing terrible ‘Violence is a terrible thing.’[Natalie, Grade VII, Spoken Expository] (18) Bet-ha-sefer hu axad ha-mekorot ha-reciniyim le-alimut. school he one the-sources the-serious to-violence ‘School is one of the most serious sources of violence.’[Hila, girl, Grade VII, written expository] (19) Alimut ben more le-talmid hi paxot nefoca. violence between teacher to-pupil she less common:FEM ‘Violence between teacher and-student is less common.’ [Gal, girl, Grade XI, Spoken Expository]

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2.3.2 Copular constructions with an overt form of haya ‘be’

In Hebrew, as a non-habere language, the same verb haya serves in the past and future tense counterparts of both predicate-initial existential and possessive sentences and of subject-initial copular constructions like those in the preceding examples. Thus, in past or future tense, these constructions have an overt form of the verb be, as shown in the two different forms of the verb haya in example (20). – Subject-initial attributive or equasional constructions with a tense-marked (past or future) form of h-y-y ‘be’ between Subject and Complement, e.g., (20) pa’am hayta li xavera še hayinu xaverot tovot once was:FEM to-me girlfriend that were: 1PLUR friends:FEM good meod very ‘Once I had a girlfriend that we were very good friends.’ [Natalie, Grade VII, Spoken Narrative]

2.3.3 Lexical verbs, finite

Finite verbs in Present, Past or Future tense like those illustrated in (21) and (22) below can occur either with or without surface subjects, as we have already seen. – SV(O), VS, or subjectless verb-initial constructions with transitive or intransitive, stative, activity, or achievement verb marked for present, past, or future tense: (21) Kayamot normot še menasim le-horid otan, še anashim exist:FM.PL norms that try:PL to-lessen them, that people yishtamshu paxot be-alimut. will-use:PL less in-violence ‘Norms exist which they try to cut down on, so people will use violence less.’ [Shachaf, boy, Grade XI, spoken expository] (22) Amarti lo še ani yaharog oto im ye’acben oti told: 1SG to-him that I 1SG:will-kill him if 3-SG:will-annoy me ‘I told him I’d kill him if he riled me.’ [Idan, boy, Grade IV, written narr]

2.3.4 Lexical verbs, nonfinite [alone in clause]

Hebrew has few nonfinite verb forms. Discounting verbless present-tense copular constructions like those in examples (17) to (19), there are basically only two nonfinite forms that occur with any frequency in Modern Hebrew: infinitives marked with prefixal le- ‘to’ as in (23) and participles (called benoni ‘intermediate’ forms), which are identical in form and in agreement marking to present-tense verbs (Berman 1978; Gordon 1982). – Infinitives or participles in conjoined or embedded clauses, e.g.,

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(23) Zehu tiv’am shel yeladim ktanim, la-riv, le-hitkotet, le-hashlim ve la-cet leloh pega. ‘It’s the nature of small kids to fight, to quarrel, to make up, and to get-out unharmed.’ [Leor, man, Computer Sciences major, written expository] (24) Hayiti mesaperet lo ha-kol ve mitya’ecet ito al was: 1SG telling:FM.SG him everything and consulting:FM.SG with him ha-kol. everything ‘I used to tell him everything and consult him on everything.’ [Dana, woman, Philosophy major, spoken narrative] (25) Ani yashavti ba-hafska ba-kita, mexin shi’urim. I sat: 1SG during-recess in-the-classroom, preparing my-lesson [Yoni, boy, Grade XI, written narrative]

2.3.5 Complex predicates

Related to the fact that Hebrew has so few nonfinite verb forms, and almost no grammatical marking of aspect, complex predicates are constructed predominantly with modal or aspectual items followed by infinitives. These may occur initially in subjectless impersonal constructions as in (26) and (27) or as tense-marking root modals in SVO constructions as in examples (28) through (30). The sentence in (31) illustrates both such options. A third type of nonsimple predicate takes the past tense of haya ‘be’ as an auxiliary with a participial form of the main verb, marking habitual past aspect, as in (32) and (33). –Predicate-initial modal operator [nonfinite] + infinitive, e.g., (26) Efshar le-daber al ze. possible to-talk on it ‘One/people can talk about it.’ [Ruti, Grade VII, spoken expository] (27) Amru li še al li le-hitarev. told:PL me that not on-me to-interfere ‘(They) told me that it’s prohibited for me to interfere.’[Avi, Bible Studies major, written narrative] – Modal verb(s) and/ or aspectual verb(s) [initial v = finite] + infinitive, e.g., (28) Im hi roca le-hamshix li-heyot xavera sheli. ‘If she wants to-continue to-be my friend.’[Bar, girl, Grade IV, spoken narrative] (29) Anashim shonim nohagim li-ftor be’ayot bi-draxim shonot. people different habit:PL to-solve problems in ways different ‘Different people are in the habit of solving problems in different ways.’ [Merav, Grade XI, written expository]

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(30) Ze kvar haya amur le-hagia mi-zman. it already was said to-arrive from-time ‘It was supposed to-arrive long-ago.’ [Gal, girl, Grade Xi, spoken narrative]; (31) Yesh le-hishtadel le-zahot xavurot ka-eylu be to-attempt to-identify groups like-that ‘One should, it is behoven to-try to-identify those kinds of gangs.’ [Lior, man, computer sciences, written expository] – Aspectual haya ‘was’ + participle = habitual aspect, e.g., (32) Hi kol ha-zman hayta mesaxsexet ben-i le-ben she all the-time was:FM:SG troubling:FM:SG between-me and-between Gal Gal ‘She used to = would constantly make trouble between me and Gal.’ [Bar, girl, Grade IV, spoken narrative] (33) Hi hayta yoshevet im ha-raglayim al ha-shulxan. she was:FM.SG sitting:FM.SG with the-legs on the-table ‘She used to sit there with her feet up on the table.’[Alon, man, Arabic studies major, spoken narrative]

2.4 Distribution of verb-predicate types As was found for the breakdown of subject constructions so, too, the distribution of verb-predicate types in our sample reveals interesting interactions between the factors of genre, age, and language-typology. Three major features of predicatetype were found to distinguish between narratives and expository texts across agegroups, irrespective of modality (speech or writing): lexical versus copular and other nominal type predicates, past versus present tense, and finite tense-marking versus nonfinite forms.“Nominal” copular constructions, without any overt verb in present tense, account for as high as one-quarter to a third of the expository texts, but only around 10% to 15% of the narratives. These generally take the form of generic statements like those illustrated in (17) through (19) in Section 2.3.1 above. And they typically serve to express generalized views about the topic under discussion (in this case, violence in schools), as shown in excerpts from 4th-grader texts in (34). (34) a.

Da’a-ti al alimut hi loh tova. opinion:FM-my on violence:FM she not good ‘My opinion of violence is not good = is not a good one OR it is not good.’ [Roni, boy, Grade IV, expository spoken] b. Alimut ze davar mag’il. violence it thing disgusting ‘Violence is a disgusting thing.’ [Liron, girl, Grade IV, expository written]

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c.

Ki anaxnu loh xayot, anaxnu bney adam. for we not animals, we sons-of Adam ‘Because we’re not animals, we’re human beings.’ [Aviv, boy, Grade IV expository written]

These generic copular statements are typically in present tense, and they often take nonspecific or abstract lexical nouns as their subject and/or complement. They constitute the key propositional elements of expository texts. In narrative texts, in marked contrast, such nonverbal, generalized statements constitute background elements, occurring mainly in the initial setting or the final coda. Their commonest function in narratives is to introduce the topic or to achieve narrative closure, as in the equivalent of ‘There’s this kid in our class who . . .’, or as in (35a) and (35b) respectively, both from the oral narrative of a fourth-grade girl, Liron. (35) a.

Yesh li album madbekot. be to-me album stickers ‘I have an album of stickers.’ b. Ve me’az anaxnu xaverot tovot. ‘And since then we (are) good friends.’

In text-medial position in narratives, nominal type verbless or other copular clauses serve for motivational or other evaluative commentary, and in this function they are commoner in the narratives of older subjects than of the younger schoolchildren. Clauses with lexical verbs, as noted, are less typical of expository texts, where they fulfil two rather different discourse functions. One is to elaborate on or illustrate a generic type of claim like those noted earlier, as in the examples in (36), also from 4th-graders: (36) a.

Ze loh yafe. Ba-bet-sefer shelanu yesh harbe alimut. Yeladim it not nice in-the-school of-us be much violence kids ravim. quarrel:PL ‘It‘s not nice. In our school there’s lots-of violence. Kids quarrel/fight.’ [Idan, boy, Grade IV, expository written] b. Da’ati al alimut ba-bet-sefer hi shlilit ki yeladim nifca’im view-my on violence in school she negative for kids are-hurt me ha-rivim ha-eyle from those fights ‘My opinion of violence in schools is negative because kids get hurt in fights.’ [Roni, boy, expository written]

As expected, clauses with lexical verbs describing events and activities form the bulk of the narrative texts, accounting for as high as 70% of clauses across age-groups. These are typically in past tense, the tense in which personal-experience narratives are predominantly anchored in both spoken and written Hebrew. Again, this major

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divide between lexically specific, verbal clauses in past tense as markers of the narrative genre compared with a strong reliance on the generic or habitual present tense form of verbal and nominal clauses in expository discourse is realized across the population, 4th-graders and highly educated adults alike, in both speech and writing. The other major distinguishing feature of these two genres in our sample is that of finiteness. Recall that Hebrew is not rich in nonfinite subordination, relying mainly on infinitives and present-tense participials, as in examples (23)–(25).⁶ And, indeed, nonfinite embedding is found mainly among the older subjects, highschoolers and adults, confirming earlier studies on clause-combining in different languages (Berman 1997a). Moreover, nonfinite subordination is more prevalent in expository than in narrative texts: only around two-thirds of the clauses in expository texts, spoken and written, have finite verbs, compared with as high as 80% of the narratives. Younger schoolchildren, including 7th-graders, rely almost entirely on finite verbs both in simple and particularly in subordinate clauses, giving their texts in general, and their narratives in particular. This lends their texts a strongly linear character, with little center-embedding or nonfinite packaging. Two other features of these texts are indicative of further distinctions across age and genre. First, reliance on complex verb phrases, like those illustrated in examples (26) through (33) in Section 2.3.5, increases substantially with age, similarly to what was found for “heavy” or complex noun phrases. Second, from 4th-grade up, these are far more prevalent in expository than in narrative texts: in the former they are largely modal, reflecting the irrealis, generic nature of expository discourse; in narratives they are also aspectual, more so among older subjects (see also Reilly et al. 2002). With age these complex predicates change in content as well as in structure. Among the 4th-graders they consist mainly of deontic, subject-oriented modals like roce ‘want’, carix ‘have to’, with an occasional propositional efshar ‘be-possible = can’. Adults use a wide variety of modal expressions, reflecting a more complex range of distanced irrealis stances on situations. And these also reflect a higher register of language use, particularly in their expository texts.

3. Modality distinctions: The factor of register In addition to these comparisons of types of subjects and predicates as diagnostic of genre distinctions across narrative and expository texts, the factor of level of language use or linguistic register was examined, in order to identify modality distinctions across speech and writing. This turns out to be critical for our study, since attempts to “raise” the register of usage constitute an important indicator of literacy. From the perspective of language variation, the project reported on here has deliberately tried to neutralize intralanguage variation along the dimensions of dialects or sociolects, by selecting basically middle-class populations from a single geographical area in each country, and from well-educated, relatively highly literate

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backgrounds, taken to represent speakers of a “standard” variety of each native language (see n. 4). Our prediction was that we would find important differences across genres, and especially across the modalities of writing versus speech, as a function of language typology and of developmental level. In typological terms, any given target language age will tend to differ in level of formality across different dimensions in different linguistic subsystems (see Aisenman 1999).

3.1 Indicators of register distinctions in Hebrew To illustrate the language-particular nature of register distinctions, and as background to analysis of the texts under study here, the following areas of register distinctiveness can be noted, many of which are highly Hebrew-specific in both form and content.

3.1.1 Lexicon

Lexical doublets deriving from either the earlier Biblical or later Mishnaic periods of its history are extremely common in Modern Hebrew, in both the major lexical classes of N, V, and A, and also in closed class items or function words. In such cases, one expression is typically confined to more formal, academic or journalistic writing, and to public lectures, speeches, and talks, while the other occurs in everyday spoken usage. In addition to this divide, there is also a rich layer of slang, or of substandard expressions, often from non-native sources (originally Yiddish or Slavic, today increasingly from Arabic). There are also numerous closed class doublets, of two kinds: (a) Various kinds of sentence-modifiers, conjunctions, prepositions, and even pronouns, e.g. (with the everyday form listed first, followed by its more formal alternate), aval/ax ‘but’, eyx/kecad ‘how’, biglal še/mekevan še ‘because’, še/asher ‘that (Relative marker)’, še/ki ‘that (Complementizer)’, ani/anoxi ‘I’; and (b) markers of syntactic constructions which differ in formality. One area in which these distinctions are particularly marked is in the contrast between constructions with finite, person-marked verbs forms in past and future compared to those with socalled benoni ‘intermediate’ forms, which are treated as part verbal, part nominal in traditional Hebrew studies, and which function as both finite present-tense and participials in Israeli Hebrew (see Section 2.3 above, also Berman 1978; Gordon 1982). For example, (a) in the context of benoni verb-forms, colloquial Hebrew usage has extended the basic subordinating marker še ‘that’ as a relative clause marker in clauses which start with a present-tense participial, though the definite marker ha- serves in this context in formal register; (b) in everyday usage, the general negator loh ‘not’ is extended to present-tense copular constructions, though the existential negator eyn serves this function in formal style; and (c) in verbless presenttense copula constructions, the impersonal generic pronoun ze ‘it, this, that’ serves in everyday Hebrew as a pronominal link between subject and complement in place of the more normative, agreement requiring personal pronouns hu, hi, hem ‘he, she, they’ in this same function.

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3.1.2 Morphology

For historical reasons, Hebrew has numerous morpho-syntactic doublets, where the usually Biblical bound form is more formal or literary, and its analytic counterpart deriving from a later stage in the language is typical of everyday usage. This is particularly marked in three domains: (a) accusative pronominal objects may be either bound as suffixes to the verb or separate lexemes, e.g., le-acreni ‘to-halt: 1SG’ [Aviv, boy, Grade VI, written narrative] and la-acor oti ‘to-halt ACC: 1SG’ both mean ‘to-stop me’, but the former is restricted to self-consciously “high” style; (b) possessive and genitive pronouns may take the form of either bound suffixes or separate lexemes following the genitive marker šel ‘of ’, e.g., both kadur-i ‘ball: 1SG’ and hakadur šel-i ‘the-ball of-1SG’ mean ‘my ball’, both bet-o ‘house: 3SG’ and ha-bayit šel-o ‘the-house of: 3SG’ = ‘his house’ (both examples of bound forms also from the written narrative of Aviv, a 4th-grade boy]; and (c) genitive phrases may take either the form of a morphologically bound head noun followed by its adjunct or two free nouns (or Noun Phrases) linked by the genitive particle šel ‘of ’ or another prepositional, e.g., both very formal (in fact, lexicalized) bet^avi ‘house:GEN father: 1SG’ and everyday ha-bayit šel ha-aba šel-i ‘the-house of the-father of-me’ stand for ‘my father’s house’, both sipur-ey^Agnon ‘stories:GEN.PL Agnon’ and ha-sipur-im shel Agnon ‘the-stories of Agnon’ refer to ‘Agnon’s stories’.

3.1.3 Syntax

There are also syntactic manifestations of the distinction between more formal and written Hebrew, in addition to amount and kind of subordination or syntactic packaging, which appear to differentiate careful written from casual spoken usage in other languages, too. Four major indicators of formal syntax in Hebrew are subject elision, VS order, nonfinite subordination, and broad use of abstract nominalizations. Subject elision. In more formal contexts, verbs in past and future tense which are inflected for person as well as for number and gender, will be used without an accompanying overt pronoun more than in everyday colloquial usage, e.g., halaxti ‘went: 1SG’ is more suited to written style (except in contrastive contexts) than equally acceptable ani halaxti ‘I went: 1SG’, na’ase ‘1PL:will-do’ is preferred to equally wellformed anaxnu na’ase with a free subject pronoun, both meaning ‘we will do’. Verb–subject order. Existential and possessive constructions as well as impersonal constructions with propositional modal operators were noted earlier as basically predicate initial in Hebrew. In addition, presentatives and other “unaccusative” type predicates will tend to elicit VS order rather than the unmarked, basic SV order of everyday spoken Hebrew, particularly in narrative texts, where this mirrors Biblical narration and the preferred style of much children’s literature. Nominalizations. Use of abstract ACTION and state nominals (derived from verbs and adjectives respectively) are, as in many other languages, far commoner in the heavier, more densely packed style of written texts, particularly of expository and other academic prose. In general, as noted, Hebrew does not have a rich array of

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nonfinite forms, relying very largely on infinitival complements and coordination of infinitival predicates to create nonfinite syntactic packaging. Clear evidence of higher-register usage is found in increased use of adverbial constructions with participial benoni ‘intermediate’ constructions and occasional gerundives (only about 10 out of nearly 50 adult texts, none from schoolchildren).

3.2 Developmental trends in register marking of modality differences In developmental perspective, consistency in maintaining a uniform level of vocabulary across a given text reveals a nonlinear patterning. Early text production tends to be largely anchored in the spoken language, and hence uniformly speechlike in register. Maturely proficient speakers-writers, in contrast, observe a consistent register within any given text, suiting their level of usage to a particular communicative context and mode of production. At intermediate stages of literacy development, a mixture of high-level, formal or literary usages plus colloquial or even slang lexicon characterizes a “semi-literate” level of text-production. This is illustrated by the roughly translated excerpts from the opening clauses of the texts of a fairly typical fourth-grader in (37) and of a representative eleventh-grader in (38). (On the criteria for “typicality”, see n. 3). Since, as noted, register distinctions tend to be highly language specific, it is very hard to identify them in another language, let alone to capture them in translation. Accordingly, I have marked highly colloquial, very speechlike or slangy usages with L (for “low”) and more formal, literary or academic expressions with H (for “high’). These are bolded in the Hebrew text and underlined in the translation. Other items are assumed to represent some intermediate, unmarked level of usage which is either not specific to a given register and/or which has no alternative form of expression in the language.

3.2.1 Examples of opening sections of four text types – Grade-schooler, Idan, boy, Grade IV:

Spoken narrative Az L yom exad ravnu al ma ze L shtut biglal she L ani amarti lo “ya, ya, ya, me” L, kashe li lehagid et ha-mila ha-zot, amarti lo “ya, L xatixat^ra!” L. ‘So L one day we-fought about you dunno L what a stupid thing cos L I said to him Ya, Ya, Ya, ma . . .” L [start of swear-word], it’s hard for me to say that word, I said to him “Ya, L piece-of-rubbish” L!’ b. Written narrative Idan 2.4.87 [= date of birth] ravti im Itay A. biglal she L karati lo “jaxnun”L ve še hu hit’acben L ve amar li “im ata gever L, tiga bi” ‘I fought with Itay A. cos L I called him “nerdie” L [distortion of Arabic-derived slang word] and that he got-mad L and said to me “If you’re a man L, touch me” ‘

(37) a.

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Spoken expository Ze L lo yafe. Ba-bet sefer shelanu gam yesh ba-kita harbe alimut. Yeladim ravim. yesh lanu yeladim ma ze L alimim ba-kita. ‘It’s L not nice. In our school also there’s lots of violence. Kids fight. We have kids you dunno L how violent in the class.’ d. Written expository Da’ati H al alimut hi H loh ha-xi L yafa. ani xoshev še hi meacbenet ki yexolim lehipaca ve yaxol liheyot L dvarim yoter gruim. ‘My opinion H [given in instructions] of violence isn’t the nicest L. I think it’s irritating because (people) can get hurt and there’s L worse things can be.’ c.

In contrast to this almost total reliance on regular or medium to low-level usages across all four text types on the part of a typical 4th-grader, consider the deliberate attempts to raise the register in the written language of a high school student in (38). – High-schooler, Dani, boy Grade XI Spoken narrative ha-riv ha-yaxid H she haya li ba-xayim L ze L haya gam im ima sheli. ze haya riv al xeshbon telefon. kibalti xeshbon telefon shel elef matayim shekel be-xodshayim ve hi ta’ana še ze biglal ha-Internet. ‘The single H quarrel that I have had in my life L it L was with my mother. It was a quarrel about a phone bill. I got a phone bill for 1200 shekels for two months and she claimed that it was because of the internet.’ b. Written narrative Ha-meriva H she-aleha H ani holex L lesaper hi H meriva im yedida H sheli. ha-meriva hitxila be-xax H she ani loh hitkasharti eleha harbe zman. ‘The argument H about which H I am going L to tell she [ = is] H an argument with a (female) friend H of mine. The argument started with the fact H that I had not contacted her in a long time.’ c. Spoken expository Alimut be-batey sefer ze davar asur behexlet H. lama, L alimut misug ze H mehava H xinux loh tov la-yeladim še hem L holxim makot L ve az hem baim ha-bayta ve holxim makot L im xaverim shelahem ba-bayit. ‘Violence in schools is an absolutely H negative thing. Why L, that type of H violence constitutes H bad education for children that get into fights L and then they go home and get into fights L with their friends at home.’

(38) a.

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d. Written expository Be-xol bet-sefer yesh alimut. yesh alimut fizit ve yesh alimut milulit. ha-alimut ha-milulit hi H zot H she nimcet H beruba H be-vatey hasefer. ha-alimut ha-fizit H nova’at H me-ha-alimut ha-milulit H. ‘Every school has violence. There is physical violence and there is verbal violence. Verbal violence is H the one H that occurs H mostly H in schools. Physical violence H derives from H verbal violence H.’ As noted, it is hard to identify the precise flavor and level of language use in translation, highlighting the point made earlier about the language-specific character of register-affecting features. Yet in fact these samples illustrate a clear developmental change which emerges with respect to register sensitivity, from grade school through adulthood. The developmental trends we detected can be summed up as follows: – Grade IV: written and spoken texts alike are anchored in speech, and colloquial usage; occasional attempts to distinguish are confined to one domain alone, either morphology, lexicon, or syntax, creating an imbalanced rhetorical effect – Grade VII: there is a clear attempt to distinguish registers of usage, but these are “mixed”: either the same text contains both very high, formal usages and everyday or even lower-register, slangish turns of phrase; and/or some but not all children in this group adopt special linguistic forms to distinguish the registers as suited to spoken versus written usage A striking example of such mixing is shown in (33), from the written narrative of a VIIth grade boy, who describes himself as complaining to his antagonist: (39) Madua natata li et ha-bomba ha-zoti? why gave: 2MASC to-me ACC the-wallop that-sorta which means roughly ‘Wherefore [ = High style] did-you-give me [ = Regular style] that sorta [colloquial, low] wallop?’ [Slang]. [Eyal, boy, Grade VII, written narrative] – Grade XI: nearly all subjects show sensitivity to the need for register distinctions in their written compared with spoken usage as well as in their expository compared with narrative texts. But they are unable to sustain this consistently across domains and/or across entire texts. They may use self-consciously “higher” turns of phrase inappropriately, so that their texts appear “semi-literate”, trying to achieve an artifically high style which they cannot sustain. High school students further differ from 7th-graders in that some features of more formal style occur only from the 11th-grade, predominantly in their written expository texts. These include use of the inflected, agreement marked form of the existential particle (e.g., yeshna alimut fizit, ve yeshna alimut milulit ‘be:FEM violence:FEM physical:FEM and be:FEM violence:FEM verbal:FEM = ‘There is physical violence, and

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there is verbal violence’ [Shaxaf, boy, Grade XI, Written Expository]) and use of the definite marker ha- as a relativizer in place of the unmarked še ‘that’ in Relative Clauses with present-tense participial verbs, e.g., alimut zo tofa’a mesukenet ha-yexola lif ’amim ligrom ‘Violence it:FEM phenomenon:FEM dangerous:FEM which may sometimes cause . . . = ‘Violence is a dangerous phenomenon which may sometimes cause . . .’ [Avivit, girl, Grade XI, Written Expository]. Such features, which are characteristically “late acquisitions”, appear markedly literacydependent, and hence typically emerge along with high-school language proficiency (Berman 1997b; Berman and Slobin 1994). – Adults: all the adults in our sample (graduate-level university students experienced in formal academic writing) make clear register distinctions across both genre and modality. This ranges from everyday colloquial style in spoken narratives to formal, academic type prose in their written expository texts. With mature, proficient users, the impact of individual style is critical in both directions. For example, to “raise” stylistic level, some adults rely heavily on nominalizations or morphologically bound forms including noun compounds, others favor highlevel vocabulary, and/or inversions of canonic SVO order. These findings for register and modality distinctions are based, as noted, on Israeli data. But they are backed up by findings for connectivity devices in a comparable sample of written versus spoken texts of French schoolchildren (Gayraud 2000) as well as across a range of means for organizing the flow of information in frogstory narratives produced by Swedish 9- and 12-year-olds compared with 15-year-olds and adults in writing and in speech (Strömqvist 1996). In France, for example, the impact of formal school study of written norms appears to affect level of language use rather earlier than in Israel; in California, possibly in American English in general, register differences appear to emerge mainly in lexical usage rather than in syntactic or morphological structure.

4. Conclusions Some tentative generalizations emerge from the sample analyzed here, which are receiving increasing support from extensions of the Hebrew-based study in crosslinguistic perspective (see endnote 3). Discussion devolves on issues of methodology, language and literacy development, relations between linguistic forms and discourse functions, and language-particular versus universal patterns.

4.1 Methodological implications To the best of my knowledge, this is the first developmentally-anchored study in which the same subjects are required to produce two types of texts, narrative and expository, in the two different modalities of speech and writing, with the topic of

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each text kept constant around a conflict-related theme. Our larger, crosslinguistic study aims at even further consistency in elicitation procedures across text types, by all being based on the same introductory “trigger” in the form of a short set of video-clips depicting situations of moral, social, and physical conflict in a school setting. Yet even this preliminary study, by applying carefully controlled and parallel methods of elicitation, goes far to counter criticisms of previous studies as being either too restricted in text-type, for example, only picturebook-based narratives (Gee 1994; Lieven 1996) or else too variable in scope (e.g., Gundel 1998). This study was a priori designed to allow for clearly generalizable findings within a given language as well as, eventually, across different languages. A second methodological lesson we are beginning to draw from our study has to do with the cross-linguistic / cross-cultural divide. It turns out that however much one aims at achieving closely parallel and so reliably comparable population samples across languages and hence across countries, any such study is in fact necessarily conducted within cultural contexts which differ quite markedly from one another. This is a fascinating theme which lies outside the present scope, beyond a few illustrative comments. First, some languages reveal greater degrees of “diglossia” than others, in the sense of differences between the linguistic usage of the everyday vernacular versus the more standard language used in schools and in official contexts. The degree, nature, and sources of diglossia vary considerably from one language to another for reasons which are socio-cultural and historical rather than linguistically structural in origin, and they have a critical impact on register differentiations. For example, in countries such as France and Israel, prescriptive dictates of an authoritarian linguistic establishment and official Language Academies have a strong impact on the aims and content of language programs in the schools. This means, for example, that French children are from an early stage taught to write “proper French”, while Israeli children are told they speak badly and do not know their language (Vigué and Jisa 1999; Katzenberger and Cahana-Amitay 1999). In Sweden, in contrast, contemporary attitudes downgrade class-based distinctions between the formal style of academic writing and everyday colloquial discourse. With regard to language background, the impact of bilingualism or even multilinguialism in such contexts as San Diego County in California, on the one hand, and Barcelona, in Catalonia, on the other, makes it difficult to define any population as strictly monolingual. With regard to schooling and level of literacy, a college-education in California might be equivalent to the final years of high school in countries like France or Sweden, and while in most of the countries in our sample, children attend grade-school through high-school from age 6 through 18, in Sweden they do so from 7 to 20. Moreover, we have found that elicitation of personal-experience accounts on affectively-laden topics such as a fight or quarrel one has been involved in provide fruitful ground for narrative text production in California, France, Israel, and Spain, but less so in more northern countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden. And there appear to be differences even between such

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geographically and linguistically related cultures as Sweden and Iceland with respect to how readily subjects will produce discursive texts on a topic such as “problems between people”.

4.2 Developmental trends This study underlines a central finding of our frogstory oral narrative project: (Berman and Slobin 1994). Becoming a native speaker is a rapid and highly efficient process, but becoming a proficient speaker takes a long time. It turns out, moreover, that becoming a proficient producer of different text types in speech and writing is an even more protracted and more laborious process. As predicted, genre distinctions as expressed by the very different linguistic forms used in narrative compared with expository texts are acquired in early school age if not before. Sensitivity to genre distinctions is well-established by 4th-grade; and this differentiation is manifested in a variety of ways: type and heaviness of subject NPs, contexts for subject ellipsis, verb-tense, verb-class, and clausal-construction type (“nominal” versus “verbal”). Some of these are peculiar to a particular native language, others may be shared across languages. In contrast, at the macro-level of global text organization, a topic not touched on here, narrative structure is mastered well before that of expository discourse, whether oral or written. Command of the range of lexical, morpho-syntactic, and rhetorical devices required to distinguish a more formal, written register from everyday spoken usage style is, in contrast, a late development. Consistently appropriate expression of register distinctions and a clear differentiation between spoken and written language in monologic text production seems confined to highly educated adults, and as such constitutes a major hallmark of literacy.

4.3 Form–function interrelations The present study underlines a further motif of our earlier research on narrative development. Genre and modality distinctions cannot be fully identified by merely quantitative analysis of the distribution of forms. Rather, as required by any genuinely “functional” orientation, linguistic forms need to be evaluated in terms of the structural contexts in which they occur together with the discourse functions which they serve. Two examples from the present analysis are the fact that null subjects occur mainly in the context of person-inflected verbs in Hebrew narratives, but in impersonal constructions in expository texts and that pronominal subject ellipsis is commoner in written than in spoken usage. Relatedly, existential or attributive copular constructions, generic present-tense verbs, and modal predicates provide the key propositional content of exposition, whereas they serve as evaluative background material or for initial orientations and final codas in narratives. These observations point to another facet of form–function based analyses, first noted within a developmental perspective by Karmiloff-Smith (1979). Different lin-

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities

guistic subsystems or modules interact in marking off one text-type from another. In the case under study here, light, personal pronoun and person-inflected subjects cooccur with perfective, past tense lexical verbs, in the highly personalized, episodically specific style of personal-experience narratives. At the other end of the continuum, 3rd person or impersonal and abstract noun phrase subjects combine with tenseless copular or generic present tense and modal irrealis types of predicates to create the generic, distanced, and depersonalized texture of expository discursive prose.

4.4 Language typology As noted, the crosslinguistic and, indeed, crosscultural, implications of the present study are only just beginning to emerge. However, it appears clear that here, as in other areas of language acquisition and use, target-language typology interacts in complex ways with more general developmental factors. I suggest that genre distinctions may be largely shared across languages, since these are anchored in general conceptual and cultural underpinnings of what constitutes a given kind of text or discourse (in the shared western type cultures investigated in the present study at all events). Clearly, language-specific properties will impinge on these distinction, to determine what constitutes, say, a “light” subject or “nonfinite verb form” in both structure and function. For example, while narratives will be in predominantly past tense and expository texts anchored in a timeless present across languages, languages with a rich grammaticalized system of aspect may mark this distinction along the perfective / imperfective axis as well. Similarly, across languages personal experience narratives will be less detached or removed from speakers than expository texts across languages. But the preferred devices for depersonalization or distancing of expository texts versus personal experience narratives will differ across languages. Thus, a cline of relative reliance on passive constructions identified in a sample of our written texts shows that English uses them quite widely; Icelandic uses them more than Swedish; Swedish speaker-writers prefer to use the impersonal pronoun man similarly to the French reliance on pronominal on; Hebrew writers also use passives sparingly, preferring various impersonal constructions of the kinds discussed above, while passives occur hardly at all in the Spanish sample, where middle-voice constructions with se and subjectless impersonals are exceedingly common. Additionally, distinctions of register, mainly but not only at the level of lexical usage and formality, tend to be high language-specific. Developments in moving from a purely speech-anchored form of text production to a more literacy-informed use of written language will depend not only on general processes of cognitive and communicative maturation, which are presumably shared across cultures. Rather, they will be critically affected by the specific nature of register distinctions, sociolinguistic variation, and speech / writing diglossia in particular languages, on the one hand, and on the context of literacy acquisition and literacy norms and conventions in different cultures, on the other.

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Notes * This study is supported by grants from the Israel Academy of Sciences to Ruth Berman and Dorit Ravid for the study of The Oral/Literate Continuum and by a Spencer Foundation Major Grant for the study of Developing Literacy, with Ruth Berman as principal investigator. I am grateful to Dorit Ravid and Dalia Cahana-Amitay of Tel Aviv University for assistance in data analysis and to the editors of this volume for their clear and helpful comments on an earlier version, presented as an invited talk to the 24th University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium, September 1998. . A clear review of relevant literature and difficulties in distinguishing these notions is provided in Biber (1995: 6–10) and Ferguson (1994). 2. The characterization of “fairly typical” derives from a global ranking of text quality for each text type (genre plus modality) in each age-group conducted on 256 Hebrew-language texts by a group of 7 judges from various disciplines (linguistics, narratology, and education). This revealed a remarkably high level of interjudge interjudge reliability (Ravid and Katzenberger 1999). The texts selected for analysis in this chapter were rated as around 3 on a scale from a low of 1 to a high of 5. 3. The study entitled “The oral/literate continuum in developmental perspective” was funded by an Israel Science Foundation grant to Ruth Berman and Dorit Ravid. It forms the background of a larger, crosslinguistic project on “Developing literacy in different contexts and in different languages” financed by a Spencer Foundation Major Grant to Ruth Berman as principal investigator, with the following cooperating investigators in eight different languages: (American) English: — Judy S. Reilly, Department of Psychology, California State University, San Diego; Catalan — Joan Perera, Institut de Ciències de l’Educació (ICE), University of Barcelona; Dutch — Ludo Verhoeven, Department of Special Education, Catholic University of Nijmegen; French — Harriet Jisa — Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Université Lumière, Lyon 2; Hebrew — Dorit Ravid, School of Education, Tel Aviv University; Icelandic — Hrafnhildur Ragnasdóttir, University College of Education, Reykjavik; Spanish — Liliana Tolchinsky, Institut de Ciències de l’Educació (ICE), University of Barcelona; Swedish — Sven Strömqvist, Department of Linguistics, Lund University. The extended study has retained the same major aims and research variables as the earlier Israel-based study: written and spoken modalities, narrative and expository text types; the same four age-groups; the same social and educational background for subjects; the shared theme of conflict situations. Modifications of the original design include: subjects in each country are first shown a short wordless video-film with clips of different conflict situations in a school setting; texts are elicited in blocks by genre — the first session only narratives or only expositories, the second the other text type; subjects are asked to tell and write a story about the same incident and to discuss the same topic in both expository texts; subjects tell the oral story to the experimenter rather than to a friend (in a lab in some countries, at school in others); the topic remains close to the general theme of conflict, but is worded differently depending on country and language (e.g., “problems between people” compared with “a predicament where someone helped you”). For details, see Berman and Verhoeven (2002). 4. The large number of independent variables — age and sex of subjects, order of text elicitation, text genre, and modality — meant that there was only a small number in each cell even for the full 16 subjects in each group (extended to 20 per group in the larger crosslinguistic study mentioned in note 3). The analysis reported here was applied to around half the subjects in each age-group.

Genre and modality in developing discourse abilities 5. Relevant findings from analysis of the full sample of 16 subjects per age-group undertaken from a rather different perspective correspond very closely indeed to the results presented here (Cahana-Amitay and Ravid 2000). 6. Hebrew does have a gerundive form of verbs, which serves in adverbial constructions like English on leaving home, in doing so, but this is highly restricted in current usage. There were less than 10 in the full sample of over 250 Hebrew texts.

References Anglin, James M. 1993. Vocabulary Development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research on Child Development, vol. 58(10). Aisenman, Ravid (ed.) 1999.Working Papers in Developing Literacy across Genres, Modalities, and Languages, vol. II: Typological Features of Project Languages. International Literacy Project, Tel Aviv University. Berman, Ruth A. 1978. Modern Hebrew Structure. Tel Aviv: Universities Publishing. Berman, Ruth A. 1980. “The case of an (S)VO language: Subjectless constructions in Modern Hebrew.” Language 56: 759–776. Berman, Ruth A. 1990. “Acquiring an (S)VO language: Subjectless sentences in children’s Hebrew.” Linguistics 28: 1135–1166. Berman, Ruth A. 1997a.“Typological perspectives on connectivity.” In N. Dittmar and Z. Penner (eds.), Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition, 203–224. Bern: Peter Lang. Berman, Ruth A. 1997b. “Preliterate knowledge of language: What five-year-olds know about language structure and language use.” In C. Pontecorvo (ed.), Writing Development: An interdisciplinary view, 61–76. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Berman, Ruth A. 1999. “Form–function relations in narrative.” In R. Aisenman (ed.), Working Papers in Developing literacy across Genres, Modalities, and Languages, vol. I: International Literacy Project, 80–92, Tel Aviv University. Berman, Ruth A. and Bracha Nir. In press. “Linguistic indicators of inter genre differentiation in later language development.” Journal of Child Language. Berman, Ruth A. and Dan I Slobin. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic development study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Berman, Ruth A. and Ludo Verhoeven. 2000. “Developing text production abilities in speech and writing.” Written Language and Literacy 5(1): 1–44. Biber, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions of Register Variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge University Press. Cahana-Amitay, Dalia and Dorit Ravid. 2000. “Optional bound morphology in the development of text production.” In S. Howell, S.A. Fish, and T. Keith-Lucas (eds.), 24th Boston University Annual Conference on Language Development, vol. 1, 176–184. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Cahana-Amitay, Dalia and Dorit Ravid. 1999. “Verbal versus nominal references to conflict situations.” Paper presented at PRAGMA99 International Conference on “Pragmatics and Negotiation” Panel on “Talking and Writing about Conflict Situations at Different Ages and in Different Lanuages”, Tel Aviv, June. Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, Charles F. 1994. “Dialect, register, and genre: Working assumptions about Conventionalization.” In D. Biber and E. Finegan (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, 15-30. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Ruth A. Berman Gayraud, Frederique. 2000. Le Développement de la différenciation Nallécrit vu à travers le lexique. Unpublished doctoral dissertation: Université Lumière Lyon 2. Gee, James.P. 1994. Review of R. A. Berman and D. I. Slobin, Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic development study. In TESL-EJ 1(2): 1–4. Gordon, Ammon. 1982. “The development of the participle in Biblical, Mishnaic, and Modern Hebrew.” Afroasiatic Linguistics 8(3):121–179. Gundel, Jeannette K. 1998. Review of P. Downing and M. Noonan (eds.), Word Order in Discourse. Language 74: 185–192. Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.). 1988. Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. (ed.) 1982. Tense–Aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Katzenberger, lrit and Dalia Cahana-Amitay. 1999.“Schooling in Israel.” In R. Aisenman (ed.), Working Papers in Developing Literacy across Genres, Modalities, and Language, vol. I: International Literacy Project, 299-301. Tel Aviv University. Lieven, Elena. 1996. Review of R. A. Berman and D. I. Slobin, Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Development study. In Functions of Language 3(1): 127–143. Martin, J.R. 1985.“Process and text: Two aspects of human semiosis.” In J. D. Benson and W. S. Greaves (eds.), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, vol. I , 248–274. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Ravid, Dorit D. and Irit Katzenberger 1999. “Global text evaluation.” In R. Aisenman (ed.), Working Papers in Developing Literacy across Genres, Modalities, and Languages, vol. I: International Literacy Project, 220–223. Tel Aviv University. Reilly, Judy S., Elishera Baruch, Harriet Jisa and Ruth A. Berman. 2002. “Propositional attitudes in written and spoken language.” Written Language and Literacy 5(2): 183–218. Rubinstein, Eliezer. 1968. ha-mishpat ha-shemani: iyunim be-taxbir yameynu. [The Nominal Sentence: Research in Contemporary Syntax]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz HaMeuchad. Strömqvist, Sven. 1996.“Discourse flow and linguistic information structuring in speech and writing.” University of Gothenburg manuscript. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomlin, Russell S. (ed.). 1987. Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vigué, Ann and Harriet Jisa. 1999. “Schooling in France.” In R. Aisenman (ed.), Working Papers in Developing Literacy across Genres, Modalities, and Languages, vol. I: International Literacy Project, 291–298. Tel Aviv University.

Index of subjects academic biliteracy 285, 288, 296 academic discourse 152–158, 159–163, 170, 308 academic essay 288 academic style 256 academic writing 149, 152–158, 160, 172, 254, 259–261, 286–288, 294, 350, 351 accessible information 66, 302 activation cost 302, 303 active (in consciousness) 44, 45, 51, 55, 66, 228, 302, 308, 312–314, 320, 321 actualities 150–151, 160 adverb 21–22, 25, 32, 42, 316 adverbial clause 32, 234, 236–238, 241, 246, 247, 273, 275, 278 advertising 149, 162–174, 251 allocation of attention 306, 320 ambiguity 132, 164, 318, 320 analytic verbs 44 ancillary 22, 33 animator 151, 155, 161, 164, 169 apology 99–116 approximative 133, 134, 140, 144 argument (of a predicate) 44, 332 argument (rhetorical) 7, 154, 254, 291–292, 294, 330 argumentative text 267–283 aspect 22, 34, 41, 43, 213–217, 219–225, 316, 323, 329, 330, 341, 342, 353 aspect-mediated manner 214, 219–223 attention unit 304, 306–308, 319, 320 attention unit length 304, 306, 319 author 155, 161, 163, 164, 169 author evaluations 32 background 32, 56–59, 80, 87, 89, 96, 106, 271, 302, 330–331, 343, 352 backlooping 33 bilingual 55, 58, 285–290, 292–295 bilingualism 295, 351 cause 80, 83, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 212, 294 citation 152–157, 159–160, 162, 164, 170–173 claim 291–2, 295, 343 clause structure 61, 62 climax 14, 17, 31, 36 clitic 303, 312, 313, 318 closing 18, 91, 92, 94 closure 20, 90, 303, 343 cognitive effect 304, 306, 320, 323 cognitive factors 306

cognitive linguistics 301–303, 312 cohesive device 307 cohesive materials 32 collocation 241, 319 colloquial 117–118, 126, 130, 145, 330, 345–347, 349–351 comment 19, 20, 23–26, 31, 33, 43, 135, 145, 294, 330 communicative interaction 107 community of practice 152, 155–158, 162, 170–173 community-specific standard English 255 comparative 129, 139–140, 229 comparison 68, 79140–143 compound dialogue 20, 28 conceptualization 9, 197, 314, 315 concession 79–80, 83–89, 292, 294–295 concomitant phenomena 22 condition 79–80, 87–89, 93 connectors 268, 271, 274, 276, 279–280 constituency structure 14 construal 197, 314 contexts of culture 94 contextual factors 53, 99–101, 103–104 contrastive rhetoric 3–7, 9–10, 262, 268–269, 271, 280–282, 285 contrastive topicalization 61, 66, 68–72 coordinated subordination 289, 292–293, 296 copula 37–39, 192, 345 cost of processing 302, 304–306 counterfactual modality 130 cross-cultural divide 351 cross-cultural pragmatics 99,113 cross-generational variation 124 cross-linguistic analysis 76, 94 cultural constraints 58, 60 cultural ideology 177, 191 cultural patterns 4–7, 253–255 cultural values 7, 10, 323 cultural variation 14, 99–102, 108, 112–114, 353 culture (definitions) 1–3 definite mention 234, 236, 238–242, 247, 248 deformations 14 deictic 185, 334 demotion 32 denouement 14, 17, 18 description 195, 197–201, 220, 224, 231–234, 242 descriptive discourse 13

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Index of subjects development (with age) 330, 332, 338, 347–350, 352 development ( of topic) 254, 258–260 developmental factors 267, 280–281, 353 developmental trends 338, 347–350, 352 diachronic development 130, 139–144, 255 dialogue 18, 20, 22–29, 31, 32, 34, 75–80, 82–87, 91, 94–96 dialogue paragraph 22–29 diminutive 38 direct quotation 149–151, 153–155, 159, 164, 171, 173 direct speech 139 discourse analysis 3, 4, 6, 8–10, 13, 129, 267, 303, 331 discourse community 255–258, 261, 274, 287 discourse marker 59, 76, 89, 90, 117–126, 129– 133, 141–143, 259, 330 discourse pattern 45 discourse representation 149–155, 157–160, 162–165, 170–173 discourse schema 255, 259 discourse unit 227–229, 291 dominance 32, 33 dominate 22, 32, 33 drift (stylistic) 253, 255–257, 259, 261–262 elaborated style 301, 323 elaboration 10, 79–81, 83–85, 87–89, 92, 93, 134, 197, 212, 221, 229, 239, 330 embedded discourse 20, 29, 31 embedding 19–21, 268, 275, 278, 279, 305, 323, 330, 344 emphasis 39–41, 48, 49, 55, 65, 132, endo-normative standard 255–256 English-based rhetorical preferences 253 episode 20, 25, 28, 29, 32, 227, 229–231, 236–249 episodic structure 229, 230, 246 epistemology 41–43 evaluation 14, 29, 80, 84, 85, 88–90, 133, 295, 330 event 18, 22, 39–47, 49, 51, 62, 66, 67, 195, 202– 204, 213–215, 217, 219–221, 224, 303, 330 execution 20, 23 exhortation 13 exigence 178–179, 181, 189–191 exo-normative standard 255–256, 259 explanation 13, 102, 104–106, 134, 137, explanatory power 13, 22, 76 expository discourse 344, 352 expository text 332, 336, 344, 352–353 figure 223, 307, 315, 320 finis 20 first generation 121–126 flashback 15, 31, 33, 34 flow of events 25

focus 39, 44–46, 55, 62, 68–69, 131–133, 140– 142, 302, 307, 308, 323, 330 focus marker 131–133, 140–142 focus of assertion 68–69, 307 focus of attention 302, 308, 323 focus of consciousness 8, 39, 44–46, 55, 62 foreground 15, 307, 308, 329, 331 form-function relations 215, 352–353 formal style 181–183, 345–347, 349–351 formality 179, 181–183, 188, 190, 192, 193, 345, 353 format (of presentation) 230, 235, 242–246, 248–249 fronted adverbial clause 237–238 generic (forms) 338, 339, 352 generic statements 342–345, 353 generic structure 75, 84 generic subordinator 130 genitive case 330 genre 129–143 genre analysis 7, 257, 286–287 genre (definition) 177–178 genre, academic essay 270, 287- 288, 295–296 genre, annual reports 304 genre, cooking class 179–191 genre distinctions 329, 332, 336–338, 342–344, 350–353 genre que 130, 135, 144 genre style 138 genre typologies 253 gestalt 227, 303–304, 319 given information 51, 68, 132, 229, 302 global syntax 331 goal (semantic) 196, 214, 223, 304, 305 goal (interactional) 76, 77, 106, 189, 190 ground 303, 307, 320, 323 head-complement 305, 315 head-modifier 305, 306, 315, 320, 322, 324, 330 hedge 131, 133, 134, 141, 184 high-schoolers 344 holistic structure 82 holistic textlinguistics 13, 33 holistic verb 44, 46–48 honorifics 181–183 hortatory template 13 hypotactic 256, 297 I mean 67, 69, 107, 109, 110, 119–121, 123–125, 138, 145 idea 39, 43–51, 62, 66–68, 302 idea units 78 image schema 301–304, 312, 319, 320–324 imperfective 213, 353 inciting incident 14, 15, 19 independent clause 281, 316, 318

Index of subjects indirect speech 16, 139 indirectness 253–254 inflection 43, 313 informal style 181, 183–185 information-related variables 274, 276, 278–279 inner speech 29 institutional expository text 304, 324 interactional paragraph 23 interlanguage 99, 114 intertextuality 149–151, 154, 157, 160, 164, 170, 172, 174, 175 intonation unit 40–41, 43, 45, 47, 53–72, 192, 231, 237, 244- 245, 248 intransitive verbs 204–205 intraparagraph relations 19, 34 ironic quotation 137–138 irrealis 32, 344, 353 journalism 149, 158–162, 172–174 juxtaposed prepositional phrases 304, 310–311 kenjoogo 181–183, 192 landmark 313–315 language of wider communication 256 Les Miserables 14 lexical density 307, 311, 314, 320, 323 lexical noun 333, 336 lexical variety 306, 307, 314, 323 lexicalization 195–197, 208, 211–212, 215–217, 223–225, 229 lexicalized 44, 221, 346 like 59, 66, 69, 70, 119–126, 129–145, 184 linear development 254, 259 linear style 254 linguistic cues 302, 305, 306 linguistic proficiency 100 linguistic typology 195, 197, 198, 224 literacy 8, 253, 263, 285–286, 302, 323, 330–331, 344–345, 347, 350–355 literacy traditions 302, 323 localities 31 location 15, 38–39, 42, 214 locational circumstances 14 lyric poetry 14 macrostructure 15–18, 33, 34 main events 22 main plot 14, 16–18 manner 195–209, 211–225 maximum interlacing of participant reference 15 metaphor 1, 2, 14, 151, 158, 171 miscommunication 99–01 mixed subordination 290, 293 modal 32, 41, 133, 336, 338, 341–342, 346, 352, 353

modality 130, 329, 332, 336, 342, 344–354 monolingual 204, 286–288, 290–296 331, 351 monomorphemic verb 212 morphology 37, 44, 52, 208, 212, 220, 227, 264, 290, 301, 312–14, 317–318, 320, 324, 329, 331, 346, 349, 355 morphosyntax 13, 33–34, 58, 62 motion 42, 195–209, 211–225, 226, 303, 306 motion trajectory 213 motion verb 211–225 mounting tension 14 Mrs. Dalloway 14 multidimensional approach 286–288 narrative 7–10, 13–15, 19–22, 25, 28–29, 31–35, 44–45, 138, 206, 211, 213, 215, 227–230, 232–233, 241, 243, 246, 248–249, 329, 331– 344, 346–354 narrative movement 13, 25 narrative template 13–15 narrator 25–26, 31, 43, 163, 167, 231–235, 240 narrator comment 26 native English speaker 100, 104–114, 122, 126 natural prominence 15 new information 51–52, 84, 227, 229, 302 news stories 158–162, 203–204, 301 newspaper editorials 6, 301 newsworthy 49–51 non-finite clause 276 nonnative speaker 100 normative standards 253, 255–260 nouement 14 noun phrase 15, 56, 234, 238, 320, 323, 332–338, 353 novel 13–34, 204–206 now 21, 24, 25, 81, 133, 136, 140, 161, 167, 186 null subject 333–334 One New Idea Constraint 55, 66–68 orthographic sentence 286, 288–290, 292–293, 295–296 Paradise Lost 17 paragraph 4–5, 7, 8, 17–34, 258, 316 participants 7, 14, 16, 18, 31, 39, 43–52, 138, 320 past participle clause 316 past perfect 213 past progressive 22, 32, 33 path 195–198, 200–206, 211–216, 219, 221, 224– 225, 304–306, 319 pause 65, 186, 192 peak marking 15, 18–20 perceptual factors 306, 312 perceptual salience 319 perfective 41, 43, 213, 220, 353 phrase structure 18, 332, 333, 336 pitch contour 64–66, 71

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360 Index of subjects plagiarism 149, 151, 152, 175 pluperfect 22, 32, 33 pluperfect past progressive 33 positioning 50, 154, 156, 157, 171 pragmatic abilities 99 pragmatic appropriateness 112 pragmatic factors 306 pragmatic failure 100 pragmatic function 131, 139, 140–141 pragmatic marker 129, 143 pragmatics 99–114, 117–126, 131–143 prepositional phrase 38, 273, 304, 306, 307, 309–312, 315–317, 320 present participle clause 316 present perfect 213 principal 151, 155, 164, 169 processing effort 307, 323 production format 149, 151, 155–156, 160–161, 163–170 profile 15, 18, 33, 34 prominence 14–15, 22, 50 promotion 32 pronoun 51, 100, 111, 155, 184, 185, 234–236, 238–242, 247–249, 278, 280, 323, 334–335, 337–339, 345, 346, 353 pronoun mention 235, 236, 238–242 prosodic schema 53, 68–72 prosodic structure 63 prosody 53–58, 61, 64–66, 68, 71–72 prototype 214, 301 prototype effect 301 punctiliar happenings 22 punctuation 136, 153, 160, 171, 307, 308, 319, 320, 324 quotative 131, 135–136, 139–142, 145 quoted attitude 137 quoted thought 136–137 reason 23–25, 27, 30–31, 33, 83, 92, 93, 295 recursion 14, 34, 35 referent 39, 44–48, 50, 182, 183, 185, 192, 240, 318 referent honorifics 182, 193 reflection 29–31 reflective verbs 16 refutation 292, 294–295 register 192, 329–330, 332, 337, 344–353 Relevance Theory 144, 302–304, 306, 323 repetition 307, 321, 331 reportative verbs 23 reported discourse 150–151, 161 reported speech 23, 29, 31, 135–136, 149–151 restatement 80, 84- 85, 88–92 restrictive relative clause 318 result 23, 30, 33, 80, 87–89, 91, 93–94 rhetorical organization 10, 286, 291, 293–295

rhetorical patterning 253–256, 261–262 rhetorical relations 19, 75–95 rhetorical style 253–262 rhetorical typology 3, 9, 286, 291–292, 293–294 rhetorical unit 291–292, 295 right-branching 273, 308, 312, 315, 323 salience 32–34, 216, 229, 247, 319, 321 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 9 satellite 10, 83–84, 87–90, 195–208, 211–225 satellite-framed 195–208, 211–225 school age 352 scope 132, 134, 138, 144, 145 second generation 121–126 semantic cluster 216–217, 223 semi-active 228, 312, 314, 320 sentence length 293, 304–306, 308–310, 319, 320 sentence structure 95 sequence 19–25, 27, 30, 33, 42, 44, 80, 89–93 setting 21–22, 32, 228, 246, 302, 331, 343 sex variation 121–126 simple past 22, 32 Simultaneous Paragraph 20–22 social distance 99–101, 103–104 social norms 99–100, 112, 191 social status 99–101, 103–104, 108–109, 111–114 social structure 177, 183, 191 sociocultural awareness 112 sociolinguistic rules 108- 109, 112–114 solution 14, 82, 83, 90 Solutionhood 83–90 sonkeigo 181–183, 192 source 196, 211–212, 304–305 speech act 99–114, 253, 291 speech genres 75–76, 79–82 speech community 255, 257, 305 stage 14, 15, 18–20, 25, 28–29, 31 stance 152, 158–159, 161–163, 170, 182, 196, 276, 278 state 39, 44, 47–49, 51, 62, 211, 213 static discourse type 13 static elements 33 stative verb 38 storyline 14, 22, 23, 29, 31–33 stratefies, apology 101–105, 112–114 strategies, politeness 7 strategies, processing 302–303, 323–324 strategies, rhetorical 8 stress 56–57, 64, 68, 308 sub-plots 16, 331 subject ellipsis 234–236, 238–239, 247, 336–337, 346, 352 subordinate subordination 289–290 subordination 5, 22, 32, 256, 269, 271, 272–275, 278, 280–281, 286, 289–290, 292–293, 331, 335, 344, 346

Index of subjects surface structure marking 14–15 syntax 272–273, 274–275, 276–278, 307–311, 346–350 T-unit 271–281 task-oriented activity 181, 186–188, 191 task-oriented dialogue 75- 82, 91 teineigo 181–183, 192 television news 149, 151, 161–162 template 13–16, 18, 33, 34, 291 tense-aspect 329, 330 text type 13, 34, 268, 269, 304 textlinguistics 13, 33, 34 textualization 294, 296 The Hobbit 197–201, 202, 204 Thesis 20–26, 28, 30–31, 33 thinking for speaking 9, 10, 208, 209, 228–229, 247 token frequency 216 tone group 56–57, 71 topic 39, 45, 51, 66–70, 253–254, 259 topic entity 66–69 topical progression 254 topic sentence 4–6 topological starting point 14 trajector 314–317 transfer 5, 100–101, 109–113, 126, 261, 263, 268–270, 276, 278–282

transfer factors 268 translation 3, 7, 40–42, 44–48, 51–52, 197–201, 208, 211, 223, 251, 263, type/token ratio 216–219, 309, 311–312, 314, 330 typicality 302, 347, 354 typological characteristics 213 typological determinism 197 typological variation 247 typology, language 35, 146, 195–208, 211–225, 229, 342, 345, 353 typology, rhetorical 3, 6, 9, 286, 291, 293–294 verb dominance 33 verb ranking 33 verb root 38, 212, 217 verb structures 14 verb-framed 195–208, 211–225 verbal events 23 volitional result 80, 87–89, 91, 93–94 word order 39, 229, 302–304, 306, 315–316, 320, 323 working attention 302, 323 working memory 72, 73, 302–303, 308, 320 you know 70, 106, 109, 119–126, 138, 140, 145, 184, 185, 187

36

Index of languages American English 58, 61–65, 68, 71–73, 99, 101, 115, 143, 193, 250, 350 American Sign Language 196 Arabic 4, 5, 164, 196, 252, 268, 342, 345, 347

Japanese 4, 6, 11, 101, 110, 114, 115, 117, 142, 143, 177–183, 185, 186, 188–191, 193, 194, 196, 211, 227, 230–232, 234, 236–249, 252, 254, 256, 258, 261, 264

Biblical Hebrew 34 Brazilian Portuguese 254, 301, 303, 309, 320

Korean 4–6, 11, 99, 100, 102–116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 196, 225, 254, 256, 259, 262, 264

Canadian French 130 Chinese 4–7, 11, 135, 150, 158–160, 168, 169, 173, 175, 176, 196, 252, 254–256, 258, 260, 261, 264, 265, 268, 283 Classical Chinese 254–256, 261

Latin 251, 252, 255, 256, 262, 293

Dutch 196–202, 323, 354 English 3–5, 11, 32, 37–48, 50–53, 55–73, 75, 78–80, 83, 87–95, 97, 99–115, 117–119, 121, 122, 124–127, 129, 130, 132, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 158–160, 168, 171, 173– 177, 183, 193–207, 209–227, 229–232, 234, 236–265, 267–283, 285–290, 292–296, 298, 299, 301–304, 308–312, 314–316, 318–320, 322–326, 330, 333, 350, 353–356 Finnish 132, 142, 196 French 4, 5, 14, 34, 129, 130, 132, 134–136, 138, 139, 141, 146, 147, 180, 185, 187, 195–204, 208, 211, 212, 252, 302, 323, 325, 333, 350, 351, 353, 354 Galician 196 German 11, 101, 117, 142, 143, 196, 197, 200– 202, 204, 211, 213, 252, 254, 255, 258, 262, 301, 302, 323, 325 Hebrew 34, 100, 101, 114, 142, 143, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 211, 213, 254, 265, 329–341, 343–347, 350, 352–356 Hindi 56, 72, 73, 254, 264 Icelandic 196, 353, 354 Indian English 56, 57 Iroquoian 37, 42, 50, 52 Italian 142, 196, 197, 208, 209, 229, 323, 333, 337

Malay 252 Mandarin 196, 254, 260, 264, 265 Middle English 255, 256 Mohawk 38 Pakistani English 53, 55, 57, 58, 60–62, 64, 66, 68, 71–73 Polish 196, 301, 302, 325 Portuguese 3, 196, 197, 252, 254, 262, 301, 303, 309–311, 315, 319, 320, 323–325 Russian 4, 5, 196, 197, 201, 202, 204, 205, 211, 252 Seneca 37–46, 49, 51, 52 Sign Language of the Netherlands 196 Spanish 4, 5, 75, 76, 78–80, 82, 84, 87, 89–94, 97, 196–205, 207–211, 213, 226, 252, 267–276, 278–282, 285–299, 303, 323–325, 329, 333, 337, 353, 354 Swedish 142, 143, 166, 196, 258, 282, 350, 353, 354 Tagalog 258 Thai 6, 11, 101 Turkish 147, 196–202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 339 Ukrainian 196, 197 Urdu 53, 55, 58–61, 63–68, 70–72 Venezuelan Spanish 285–288, 293–295 Yiddish 196, 345

Index of names Aristotle 13 Bakhtin, Mikhail 75, 96 Berman, Ruth 8–10, 201, 202, 209, 211–216, 220, 224, 225, 228, 229, 249, 329–333, 336, 337, 340, 344, 345, 350, 352, 354–356 Blondeau, Helene 127 Blum-Kulka, Shosanna 99, 101, 102, 107, 114, 115 Bowerman, Melissa 38, 52, 211, 225 Brinton, Laurel J. 117, 121, 126, 143, 146 Chafe, Wallace 8–10, 37, 39, 41, 43, 50–52, 54– 56, 59–64, 66–68, 72, 78, 96, 144, 146, 183, 193, 228, 229, 231, 246, 248–250, 275, 282, 302, 305, 307, 308, 324, 325, 338, 355 Clyne, Michael 6, 11, 253–255, 262, 301, 323, 325 Cohen, Andrew 73, 100, 102, 114, 115 Connor, Ulla 6, 7, 11, 253, 254, 259, 260, 262– 264, 285, 297, 298 Eggington, William 6, 11, 251, 254, 256, 259, 264, 265 Fleischman, Suzanne 129, 131, 136, 141, 144, 146 Fonollosa, Marie-Odile 127 Fraser, Bruce 75, 99, 115, 143, 146 Gagnon, Lucie 127 Geertz, Clifford 2, 3, 11 Goffman, Erving 99, 115, 149–152, 155, 161, 174 Gumperz, John J. 11, 52, 54–57, 60, 71, 73, 210, 226, 250 Halliday, M. A. K. 6, 10, 11, 56, 73, 145, 146, 271, 297, 307, 325 Hinds, John 6, 11, 254, 256, 261, 264 Hugo, Victor 14 Jucker, Andreas H. 117, 126, 131, 143, 145, 146 Kaplan, Robert 4–8, 11, 253, 254, 262, 264, 265, 267, 269, 274, 282, 285, 287, 296–298, 302, 325 Kasper, Gabriele 100, 101, 114, 115 Labov, William 95, 97, 126, 127 Langacker, Ron 301, 304, 306, 312, 314, 326 Lange, Deborah 117, 121, 127, 130, 131, 136, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1–3, 11

Longacre, Robert E. 7, 8, 11, 13–16, 18, 19, 23, 25, 32, 34, 35 Mann, William 19, 34–36, 76–78, 82, 90, 96, 97, 177, 296, 298, 306, 309–312 Miller, Jim 117, 127, 130–132, 140, 144, 147, 177, 178, 189, 192, 194 Milton, John 17 Mithun, Marianne 44, 52 Nagy, Naomi 127 Olshtain, Elite 100, 102, 107, 114, 115 Romaine, Suzanne 117, 121, 127, 130, 131, 136, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147, 181, 183, 192, 194 Sankoff, Gillian 117, 119, 126, 127 Schiffrin, Deborah 117, 127, 145, 147 Scollon, Ron 7, 11, 110, 115, 149–152, 156, 158– 162, 172, 173, 175, 176 Schourup, Lawrence C. 127, 130, 131, 133, 136, 144, 145, 147 Slobin, Dan I. 8–11, 133, 147, 195, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208–216, 220, 224–226, 228, 229, 231, 247, 249, 250, 329, 331, 337, 350, 352, 355, 356 Sperber, Dan 2, 3, 11, 138, 147, 302, 320, 323, 326 Swales, John 7, 11, 251, 257, 261, 265, 286, 299, 329, 356 Taboada, Maite 75, 97 Talmy, Len 9, 11, 195, 210, 211, 214, 215, 221, 224, 226, 281, 282 Tannen, Deborah 72, 73, 131, 136, 144, 147, 183, 193, 194, 229, 249, 250 Thibault, Pierrette 127 Thompson, Sandra 19, 35, 36, 54, 57, 73, 76–78, 90, 96, 97, 210, 226, 249, 260, 264, 282, 296, 298, 331, 356 Tolkien, J. R. 197–199, 210 Trosborg, Anna 102, 115 van Dijk, Teun 15, 36, 301, 327 Watts, Richard J. 117, 127 Weinert, Regina 117, 127, 130–132, 140, 144, 147 Williams, Mary 16, 36 Wilson, Deirdre 138, 147, 302, 320, 323, 326 Wolf, Virginia 14, 101

In the series Studies in Language Companion Series the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

ABRAHAM, Werner (ed.): Valence, Semantic Case, and Grammatical Relations. Workshop studies prepared for the 12th International Congress of Linguists, Vienna, August 29th to September 3rd, 1977. 1978. xiv, 729 pp. Out of print ANWAR, Mohamed Sami: BE and Equational Sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. 1979. vi, 128 pp. MALKIEL, Yakov: From Particular to General Linguistics. Selected Essays 1965–1978. With an introduction by the author, an index rerum and an index nominum. 1983. xxii, 659 pp. LLOYD, Albert L.: Anatomy of the Verb. The Gothic Verb as a Model for a Unified Theory of Aspect, Actional Types, and Verbal Velocity. (Part I: Theory; Part II: Application). 1979. x, 351 pp. HAIMAN, John: Hua: A Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. 1980. iv, 550 pp. VAGO, Robert M. (ed.): Issues in Vowel Harmony. Proceedings of the CUNY Linguistics Conference on Vowel Harmony, May 14, 1977. 1980. xx, 340 pp. PARRET, Herman, Marina SBISÀ and Jef VERSCHUEREN (eds.): Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics. Proceedings of the Conference on Pragmatics, Urbino, July 8–14, 1979. 1981. x, 854 pp. BARTH, E.M. and J.L. MARTENS (eds.): Argumentation: Approaches to Theory Formation. Containing the Contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978. 1982. xviii, 333 pp. LANG, Ewald and John PHEBY: The Semantics of Coordination. (English transl. by John Pheby from the German orig. ed. 'Semantik der koordinativen Verknüpfung', Berlin, 1977). 1984. 300 pp. DRESSLER, Wolfgang U., Willi MAYERTHALER, Oswald PANAGL and Wolfgang Ullrich WURZEL: Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. 1988. ix, 168 pp. PANHUIS, Dirk G.J.: The Communicative Perspective in the Sentence. A study of Latin word order. 1982. viii, 172 pp. PINKSTER, Harm (ed.): Latin Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Proceedings of the 1st International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Amsterdam, April 1981. 1983. xviii, 307 pp. REESINK, Ger P.: Structures and their Functions in Usan. 1987. xviii, 369 pp. BENSON, Morton, Evelyn BENSON and Robert F. ILSON: Lexicographic Description of English. 1986. xiii, 275 pp. JUSTICE, David: The Semantics of Form in Arabic. In the mirror of European languages. 1987. iv, 417 pp. CONTE, Maria-Elisabeth, János Sánder PETÖFI and Emel SÖZER (eds.): Text and Discourse Connectedness. Proceedings of the Conference on Connexity and Coherence, Urbino, July 16–21, 1984. 1989. xxiv, 584 pp. CALBOLI, Gualtiero (ed.): Subordination and Other Topics in Latin. Proceedings of the Third Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Bologna, 1–5 April 1985. 1989. xxix, 691 pp. WIERZBICKA, Anna: The Semantics of Grammar. 1988. vii, 581 pp. BLUST, Robert A.: Austronesian Root Theory. An essay on the limits of morphology. 1988. xi, 190 pp. VERHAAR, John W.M. (ed.): Melanesian Pidgin and Tok Pisin. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles in Melanesia. 1990. xiv, 409 pp. COLEMAN, Robert (ed.): New Studies in Latin Linguistics. Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Cambridge, April 1987. 1990. x, 480 pp. McGREGOR, William B.: A Functional Grammar of Gooniyandi. 1990. xx, 618 pp. COMRIE, Bernard and Maria POLINSKY (eds.): Causatives and Transitivity. 1993. x, 399 pp. BHAT, D.N.S.: The Adjectival Category. Criteria for differentiation and identification. 1994. xii, 295 pp. GODDARD, Cliff and Anna WIERZBICKA (eds.): Semantic and Lexical Universals. Theory and empirical findings. 1994. viii, 510 pp. LIMA, Susan D., Roberta L. CORRIGAN and Gregory K. IVERSON: The Reality of Linguistic Rules. 1994. xxiii, 480 pp.

27 ABRAHAM, Werner, T. GIVÓN and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds.): Discourse, Grammar and Typology. Papers in honor of John W.M. Verhaar. 1995. xx, 352 pp. 28 HERMAN, József (ed.): Linguistic Studies on Latin. Selected papers from the 6th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics (Budapest, 23–27 March 1991). 1994. ix, 421 pp. 29 ENGBERG-PEDERSEN, Elisabeth, Michael FORTESCUE, Peter HARDER, Lars HELTOFT and Lisbeth Falster JAKOBSEN (eds.): Content, Expression and Structure. Studies in Danish functional grammar. 1996. xvi, 510 pp. 30 HUFFMAN, Alan: The Categories of Grammar. French lui and le. 1997. xiv, 379 pp. 31 WANNER, Leo (ed.): Lexical Functions in Lexicography and Natural Language Processing. 1996. xx, 355 pp. 32 FRAJZYNGIER, Zygmunt: Grammaticalization of the Complex Sentence. A case study in Chadic. 1996. xviii, 501 pp. 33 VELÁZQUEZ-CASTILLO, Maura: The Grammar of Possession. Inalienability, incorporation and possessor ascension in Guaraní. 1996. xvi, 274 pp. 34 HATAV, Galia: The Semantics of Aspect and Modality. Evidence from English and Biblical Hebrew. 1997. x, 224 pp. 35 MATSUMOTO, Yoshiko: Noun-Modifying Constructions in Japanese. A frame semantic approach. 1997. viii, 204 pp. 36 KAMIO, Akio (ed.): Directions in Functional Linguistics. 1997. xiii, 259 pp. 37 HARVEY, Mark and Nicholas REID (eds.): Nominal Classification in Aboriginal Australia. 1997. x, 296 pp. 38 HACKING, Jane F.: Coding the Hypothetical. A comparative typology of Russian and Macedonian conditionals. 1998. vi, 156 pp. 39 WANNER, Leo (ed.): Recent Trends in Meaning–Text Theory. 1997. xx, 202 pp. 40 BIRNER, Betty and Gregory WARD: Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. 1998. xiv, 314 pp. 41 DARNELL, Michael, Edith MORAVSCIK, Michael NOONAN, Frederick NEWMEYER and Kathleen M. WHEATLEY (eds.): Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics. Volume I: General papers. 1999. vi, 486 pp. 42 DARNELL, Michael, Edith MORAVSCIK, Michael NOONAN, Frederick NEWMEYER and Kathleen M. WHEATLEY (eds.): Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics. Volume II: Case studies. 1999. vi, 407 pp. 43 OLBERTZ, Hella, Kees HENGEVELD and Jesús SÁNCHEZ GARCÍA (eds.): The Structure of the Lexicon in Functional Grammar. 1998. xii, 312 pp. 44 HANNAY, Mike and A. Machtelt BOLKESTEIN (eds.): Functional Grammar and Verbal Interaction. 1998. xii, 304 pp. 45 COLLINS, Peter and David LEE (eds.): The Clause in English. In honour of Rodney Huddleston. 1999. xv, 342 pp. 46 YAMAMOTO, Mutsumi: Animacy and Reference. A cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. 1999. xviii, 278 pp. 47 BRINTON, Laurel J. and Minoji AKIMOTO (eds.): Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English. 1999. xiv, 283 pp. 48 MANNEY, Linda Joyce: Middle Voice in Modern Greek. Meaning and function of an inflectional category. 2000. xiii, 262 pp. 49 BHAT, D.N.S.: The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood. 1999. xii, 198 pp. 50 ABRAHAM, Werner and Leonid KULIKOV (eds.): Tense-Aspect, Transitivity and Causativity. Essays in honour of Vladimir Nedjalkov. 1999. xxxiv, 359 pp. 51 ZIEGELER, Debra: Hypothetical Modality. Grammaticalisation in an L2 dialect. 2000. xx, 290 pp. 52 TORRES CACOULLOS, Rena: Grammaticization, Synchronic Variation, and Language Contact. A study of Spanish progressive -ndo constructions. 2000. xvi, 255 pp. 53 FISCHER, Olga, Anette ROSENBACH and Dieter STEIN (eds.): Pathways of Change. Grammaticalization in English. 2000. x, 391 pp. 54 DAHL, Östen and Maria KOPTJEVSKAJA-TAMM (eds.): Circum-Baltic Languages. Volume 1: Past

and Present. 2001. xx, 382 pp. 55 DAHL, Östen and Maria KOPTJEVSKAJA-TAMM (eds.): Circum-Baltic Languages. Volume 2: Grammar and Typology. 2001. xx, 423 pp. 56 FAARLUND, Jan Terje (ed.): Grammatical Relations in Change. 2001. viii, 326 pp. 57 MEL’ČUK, Igor A.: Communicative Organization in Natural Language. The semantic-communicative structure of sentences. 2001. xii, 393 pp. 58 MAYLOR, B. Roger: Lexical Template Morphology. Change of state and the verbal prefixes in German. 2002. x, 273 pp. 59 SHI, Yuzhi: The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar. The formation of the resultative construction and its effects. 2002. xiv, 262 pp. 60 GODDARD, Cliff and Anna WIERZBICKA (eds.): Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 1. 2002. xvi, 337 pp. 61 GODDARD, Cliff and Anna WIERZBICKA (eds.): Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 2. 2002. xvi, 337 pp. 62 FIELD, Fredric W.: Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts. With a foreword by Bernard Comrie. 2002. xviii, 255 pp. 63 BUTLER, Christopher S.: Structure and Function – A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 1: Approaches to the simplex clause. 2003. xx, 573 pp. 64 BUTLER, Christopher S.: Structure and Function – A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 2: From clause to discourse and beyond. 2003. xiv, 579 pp. 65 MATSUMOTO, Kazuko: Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation. Syntactic, informational and functional structures. 2003. xviii, 215 pp. 66 NARIYAMA, Shigeko: Ellipsis and Reference Tracking in Japanese. 2003. xvi, 400 pp. 67 LURAGHI, Silvia: On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. The expression of semantic roles in Ancient Greek. 2003. xii, 366 pp. 68 MODER, Carol Lynn and Aida MARTINOVIC-ZIC (eds.): Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. 2004. vi, 349 pp. + index. 69 TANAKA, Lidia: Gender, Language and Culture. A study of Japanese television interview discourse. 2004. xvii, 233 pp. 70 LEFEBVRE, Claire: Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 2004. xvi, 358 pp. 71 DAHL, Östen: The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. 2004. x, 333 pp. 72 FRAJZYNGIER, Zygmunt, Adam HODGES and David S. ROOD (eds.): Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Expected Winter 2004.